Polymarket Perps

Launched on 03/09/2026, Polymarket Perps is a hybrid (off-chain order book, on-chain settlement) perpetual futures exchange operated by Polymarket, headquartered in New York, United States. It supports perpetual swaps on crypto assets, US and international equities, equity indices and commodities, with isolated and cross margin and leverage of up to 20x. It is not a fiat on-ramp: collateral is pUSD, deposited and withdrawn on Polygon (chain ID 137). Polymarket Perps is not licensed as a derivatives venue; order placement is not permitted from the United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk or Luhansk. US users are directed to Polymarket US, a separately operated CFTC-regulated designated contract market that does not offer perps.

Products

As of 29 September 2026 the exchange lists 88 perpetual markets: 40 crypto (e.g. BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE, XRP, DOGE), 38 single-name equities (e.g. NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, MSFT, TSM, Samsung, SK Hynix, Alibaba), 6 indices (e.g. S&P 500, Nasdaq 100) and 4 commodities (gold, silver, WTI and Brent crude). Contracts are linear, USD-quoted and never expire. Maximum leverage is 20x on major crypto, the S&P 500, oil, gold and silver and 10x on most other listed assets, with position-size risk tiers that reduce leverage for larger notional. Early-access markets went live on 1 August 2026; the venue opened publicly on 3 September 2026 with 67 markets and has since expanded to 88.

Trading and pricing

The order book, matching, funding, margin checks and liquidations run continuously, 24/7, including when the underlying equity or commodity market is closed; sessions only change which external feeds compute the Index Price. Each market has an Index Price (fair value from external feeds), a Mark Price (used for margin, liquidation and funding) and a Last Trade Price. Funding is settled hourly: the premium index is sampled every five seconds by walking the book for 1,000 quote-notional per side, averaged over the hour, and capped at +/-4% per hour. Maintenance margin is flat per market at 0.5 / max leverage (2.5% on 20x markets). Liquidations use reduce-only IOC orders; an insurance fund absorbs positions whose equity falls below two-thirds of maintenance margin. Self-trade prevention is enforced.

Fees

Taker and maker fees are tiered on trailing 30-day volume, recalculated daily (UTC): 0.040% taker / 0.0125% maker at the base tier, stepping down to 0.020% taker / -0.005% maker (a rebate) above $1B. Fees are charged on notional in pUSD. There are no exchange deposit or withdrawal fees beyond Polygon network gas; minimum deposit is 10 pUSD.

Architecture

Order matching, margin and funding run off-chain for low latency; deposits and withdrawals settle on Polygon, and the exchange periodically commits state roots on-chain summarising account balances so positions can be verified. Every order is signed by the trader, so the engine can only act on trades the trader authorised. Full public market data (instruments, tickers, order book, trades, candles, funding) is available without authentication at api.perpetuals.polymarket.com, with WebSocket streams at ws.perpetuals.polymarket.com.

Company

Polymarket was founded in 2020 by Shayne Coplan. Its prediction-market exchange processed $25.7B of volume in March 2026 across 1.29M active wallets. Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE's parent) invested $2B in October 2025 and is the largest shareholder; a $1B round led by 1789 Capital in August 2026 valued the company at $21B.