Polymarket to Upgrade Settlement Rules for Crypto Bull-Bear Markets

ChainCatcher report: According to official announcements, the prediction market Polymarket has declared a major adjustment to its settlement mechanism for crypto price movement markets, effective August 7, to safeguard market integrity. Starting at 00:00 UTC on that day, affected markets will no longer be settled based on a single-point price snapshot but will instead use a time-weighted average price (TWAP). Different market durations correspond to different TWAP windows: all 5-minute crypto markets will use a 30-second TWAP, while 15-minute and 4-hour markets will both use a 60-second TWAP. The previous single-snapshot settlement method was vulnerable to price manipulation during periods of low liquidity; this change represents Polymarket’s proactive reinforcement of market integrity following increased regulatory scrutiny. To support this transition, Polymarket will inject $1 million in liquidity incentives across all affected markets throughout August. On the technical side, Chainlink TWAP testnet data feeds are already available; mainnet data feeds and Polymarket’s real-time data stream service will go live on August 4, allowing developers to directly access TWAP prices via Chainlink Data Streams or Polymarket’s public WebSocket.