Hello everyone, what does it mean when the world's largest decentralized prediction market decides to 'start over' its underlying infrastructure?
A comprehensive evolution that balances extreme speed and decentralized security is about to begin.
As the largest and most prominent fully on-chain prediction market in the world, Polymarket is brewing its most extensive platform overhaul since its launch in 2020.
This Monday, Polymarket officially dropped a bomb on X: “We will fully upgrade the entire Polymarket exchange's tech stack in the next 2 to 3 weeks. A brand new smart contract, a brand new order book, a brand new collateral token.”
Faced with the crazy encirclement by traditional tech giants and Web3 newcomers, Polymarket chose to take the initiative.
Here are the highlights of this V2 core upgrade broken down for you:
I. Major Overhaul of the Trading Engine: CTF V2 Arrives
The absolute core of this upgrade is the full activation of the upgraded Polymarket CTF Exchange V2 (responsible for managing all on-chain operations through global smart contracts).
For ordinary users, the most intuitive feeling is: faster and cheaper. The brand new matching engine has undergone extremely deep optimization, significantly reducing the on-chain computing steps required for verification and pairing orders. At the same time, the system has restructured the order's Struct.
💡 【Plain Language】Struct (Data Structure): You can think of it as the 'delivery slip' that users need to fill out when placing an order. The previous delivery slip was designed to be very cumbersome, requiring a lot of unnecessary information, leading to slow system processing and high gas fees. The V2 version has significantly streamlined the required fields of this 'delivery slip', thereby greatly reducing users' trading costs.
In the order matching model, the V2 version will adopt an upgraded CLOB (Central Limit Order Book).
💡 【Plain Language】CLOB Off-chain Matching + On-chain Settlement: Pure on-chain exchanges (like early Uniswap) are slow and easily attacked by hackers because every step must go on-chain. The hybrid model adopted by Polymarket is: user buy and sell orders are instantly matched on 'high-performance off-chain servers' (providing an experience comparable to Binance and Nasdaq), and once matched successfully, the final fund settlement results are packaged and uploaded to the blockchain (ensuring absolute security and immutability of funds).
Note: For ordinary retail investors, this migration will be seamless; however, for quantitative teams that develop trading bots or API interfaces, it is necessary to update the SDK promptly and re-sign orders with the new structure.
II. Clearing Institutional Entry Barriers: Comprehensive Support for EIP-1271 Standard
This may be the most attractive change for large funds and institutional investors (whales). The V2 version will officially introduce support for the Ethereum EIP-1271 standard.
💡 【Plain Language】EIP-1271 and Smart Contract Wallets: Traditional Web3 wallets (like MetaMask) are controlled by a single private key, which is extremely unsafe for institutions with large amounts of funds. Institutions prefer to use 'smart contract wallets (like S..e multi-signature wallets)'—to access funds, 3 out of 5 executives in the company must click to agree together. However, previous Polymarket could not easily recognize such complex 'multi-sign orders'. With the integration of the EIP-1271 standard, institutional multi-signature wallets can perform high-frequency trading directly and smoothly on Polymarket, effectively paving a highway for institutional funds from Wall Street.
III. Farewell to Historical Burdens: Launch of the Native Polymarket USD Stablecoin
In terms of fund settlement, Polymarket made a decision that concerns the life and death of the protocol: to abandon USDC.e and issue a 1:1 pegged native Polymarket USD.
💡 【Plain Language】The deadly hidden dangers of cross-chain bridge assets (USDC.e): Polymarket operates on the Polygon chain. The USDC.e that everyone used before was not real money issued directly by the issuer Circle on Polygon, but rather a 'voucher' mapped over from Ethereum through a 'cross-chain bridge'. As we have seen in various hacker security reports, cross-chain bridges are the most easily attacked vaults. Once the bridge is hacked, these vouchers instantaneously lose all value.
To completely eliminate this systemic risk, Polymarket has launched its own native collateral token. The front-end system will automatically help ordinary users complete the seamless fund conversion (requiring only one authorization popup). For professional users, they can manually complete lossless exchanges by calling a specialized wrap() function.
It is worth noting that in Monday's official lengthy article, the management did not mention the previously speculated issuance plan for the platform governance token (POLY coin).
IV. Capital Feast: Ambitions and Meat Grinder Battlefield with a Valuation of $20 Billion
Polymarket's choice to undertake a 'bone-deep' overhaul at this time is by no means coincidental.
The current prediction market track has transformed from a blue ocean into an extremely brutal meat grinder. In addition to the relentless pressure from old rival Kalshi, top global crypto platforms like Coinbase, Crypto.com, and even traditional US sports betting giants like DraftKings have all entered this battlefield, trying to get a share.
However, Polymarket's trump card remains terrifyingly strong. According to The Block, this startup established in 2020 is backed by **Intercontinental Exchange Group (ICE, parent company of the New York Stock Exchange)** and other super traditional financial oligarchs. Currently, Polymarket is embarking on a new round of crazy financing in the capital market with a terrifying valuation of nearly $20 billion (about 140 billion RMB).
Conclusion:
At some point in the next 2-3 weeks, Polymarket will undergo a brief downtime for maintenance (the official announcement will be made one week in advance), and all old order books will be completely cleared and reset.
When it restarts again, this $20 billion valuation prediction machine will officially declare the new era of Web3 applications evolving into mature financial infrastructure, equipped with a brand new hybrid matching engine, absolutely secure institutional-level multi-sign channels, and purer native assets.
⚠️ 【Disclaimer】The content of this article is solely for the analysis of business models and sharing of technical knowledge, with data sourced from the internet. It does not constitute any investment or operational advice, nor does it assume responsibility for the authenticity of the data. Please research independently and make cautious decisions.
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