BlockBeats news: On January 6, prediction market platform Polymarket recently updated its official documentation, revealing that it has introduced taker-only fees in its 15-minute cryptocurrency price movement markets. This marks an adjustment to its long-standing "zero-fee" trading model.
According to the update, relevant trading fees will be used to fund liquidity incentives for market makers. All fees paid by takers will be returned daily in USDC to liquidity providers, rather than being retained by the platform. This adjustment applies only to 15-minute cryptocurrency markets, while the majority of other markets will remain fee-free.
The transaction fee level varies with market probability. The fee is highest when the price is near 50%, and it approaches zero as the probability approaches 0% or 100%. According to an official example, if you trade 100 contracts at a price of $0.50, the transaction fee would be approximately $1.56, which accounts for about 3% of the transaction amount at the peak of the fee rate curve.
This adjustment has not been officially announced, but the document history shows that the relevant terms are newly added. The community generally believes that this change is not a comprehensive move toward a paid platform, but rather an optimization of the market structure targeting high-frequency bots and volume-inflating trades, aiming to improve liquidity quality and narrow spreads. Polymarket stated that long-term event markets, political markets, and non-cryptocurrency prediction markets are unaffected, and the overall impact on regular users is limited.