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Common questions about Polymarket Perps.

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General

Polymarket Perps is a perpetual futures exchange offering continuous exposure to equities, indices, commodities, and other underlyings. Positions have no expiry. A funding rate keeps the contract price tethered to the underlying’s spot price over time.
Fetch the current product list, symbols, underlyings, reference feeds, and leverage settings from GET /v1/info/instruments.
Hybrid. Order matching, margin, and funding run off-chain for low latency. Deposits and withdrawals settle on Polygon, and the exchange periodically posts state-root commitments on-chain so off-chain activity stays verifiable.
Yes. The order book, matching, funding, margin checks, and liquidations all run continuously. What changes outside of regular hours is the set of external feeds used to compute Index and Mark.
No. Perpetual futures have no expiration date. A Perps position stays open until you close it or it is force-closed by liquidation.
Yes. “Perps” is trader shorthand for “perpetual futures.” Both refer to the same derivative contract: a futures-style instrument with no expiry, anchored to the underlying’s spot price through periodic funding.
Polymarket’s prediction markets settle Yes or No shares at 1or1 or 0 based on a discrete event outcome. Perps are continuous: there is no event resolution and no 0/0/1 settlement. Instead you take a long or short position whose value moves with the underlying asset’s price, subject to funding payments and margin requirements like any perpetual futures contract.

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Trading and Orders

Limit and market-style orders are supported with gtc, ioc, and fok time-in-force values. GTC orders can be tagged post-only, which rejects the order if it would take liquidity. Closing orders can be tagged reduce-only, which prevents the order from increasing exposure. See Configure Order Behavior and Close a Position.
Pre-trade margin uses the worst-case position size from your existing exposure plus all resting orders on each side, not just the current position.
WorstCaseSize = max(|Position + OpenBuys|, |Position - OpenSells|)
If Equity < IM_required for that worst case, the order is rejected even though current equity is comfortable.
Self-trade prevention is on by default for every order and runs in CancelMaker mode: when a taker would match against a resting order on the same account, the conflicting resting maker is canceled and the taker continues matching against other makers. It is not an API setting. There is no way to turn it off or change its mode.

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Pricing, Mark, Index, and Funding

  • Index Price is the protocol’s estimate of the underlying’s fair value, aggregated from external oracle feeds.
  • Mark Price is the price the system uses for margin, PnL, liquidation, and funding.
  • Last trade price is the price of the most recent fill on the local book. It is not used for margining.
See Prices.
Each Mark candidate degrades gracefully to the Index. If the order book mid is missing, the candidate falls back to Index. If there are no recent trades or quotes, the candidate falls back to Index. If external mark feeds are unavailable, the candidate falls back to Index. In the worst case, all candidates converge to Index and Mark tracks Index directly.
A premium index is sampled every 5 seconds by walking the book for 1,000 quote-asset notional on each side. Samples are averaged over a 1-hour charge window, run through an 8-hour formula with a fixed interest leg and clamp, divided by 8, and capped at +/-4% per hour. Settlement happens once per window. Longs pay shorts when the rate is positive, and shorts pay longs when negative. The protocol takes no cut.
Yes. A rolling 5-second premium sample and its implied 8-hour rate are published continuously through public market data. You can also read funding history with GET /v1/info/funding.

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Margin and Leverage

  • Isolated margin funds each position with a dedicated margin allocation. Liquidation only closes the affected position.
  • Cross margin shares account collateral across all cross positions. Unrealized PnL on one position can offset margin on another, but a liquidation evaluates and can unwind the whole cross account.
The web app opens new positions in isolated mode by default. Cross is opt-in through the API using leverage configuration. See Update Leverage.
Margin requirements scale with position notional through tiers. Larger positions need proportionally more margin to limit system-wide risk and reduce liquidation cascades. Margin is calculated incrementally across tiers, equivalent to summing bracket by bracket. Fetch live tier values from GET /v1/info/instruments.
By design, maintenance margin rate is half of the maximum leverage requirement for the tier. A position is liquidated only after losing roughly half of the margin posted to open it, which gives traders a buffer between entering a position and being force-closed.
Three states are evaluated continuously.
StateConditionBehavior
HealthyEquity >= IMNormal trading
Margin callMM <= Equity < IMReduce-only: close exposure or deposit collateral
LiquidationEquity < MMSystem closes the position
A deposit during margin call instantly increases equity and can restore healthy status.
Yes, as long as Equity_after >= IM_required after the withdrawal. You cannot withdraw yourself into a margin call.

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Liquidation

Liquidation occurs when account equity falls below maintenance margin. Cross and isolated positions are checked independently: each isolated position has its own equity and maintenance margin, while cross uses the account’s combined equity and combined maintenance margin. See Margin and Liquidation.
For cross positions, the liquidation price depends on available balance: everything in the cross account that is not this position’s own equity. Mark moves on other cross positions, size changes, or collateral changes can all shift the liquidation price for every cross position simultaneously.
The affected scope is flagged and new orders on it are blocked. Cross blocks the whole account. Isolated blocks just that instrument. The system closes positions with reduce-only IOC orders, rate-limited per account, re-evaluating margin between fills. Cross liquidation closes one position at a time across cycles. If equity recovers above the recovery initial margin, the flag clears.
When equity falls below two-thirds of maintenance margin, order-book liquidation is unlikely to recover value, so the system absorbs the position directly into the insurance-fund account along with its margin. For cross backstop, the system absorbs all cross positions plus quote balance.
Yes. While flagged, every fill pays an additional liquidation fee rate on top of the maker or taker rate.
FillFee = Notional * (MakerOrTakerRate + LiquidationFeeRate)
Fetch the live rate per instrument from GET /v1/info/instruments.

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Fees

During the launch period, fees are flat.
RoleRate
Maker-0.5 bp (rebate)
Taker2 bp
Fees are calculated per fill as abs(Price * Quantity) * Rate, denominated in the instrument’s quote asset. After launch, the platform will move to a tiered structure based on volume and maker share. Details will be published before the transition. See Trading Fees.

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API and Integration

Your main wallet signs the one-time create-proxy request and never trades directly. The returned proxy address and secret are what you use day to day: the proxy private key signs trade requests, and the (proxy, secret) pair authenticates private REST and WebSocket reads. This isolates the trading key from the wallet that holds funds. See Set Up Authentication.
Your account is keyed by your EOA base address, the externally-owned account that signs createProxy, not a Safe smart-contract wallet address. Even if you use a Safe wallet elsewhere on Polymarket, your Perps balances, positions, and history are all tracked against the underlying EOA. Use that EOA when looking up your account or referencing it in support requests.
  • Signed requests with sig, salt, and ts: POST /account/key, all /trade/* actions, and PATCH /trade/leverage. The signer is the main address for createProxy and the proxy address for everything else.
  • Header credentials with POLYMARKET-PROXY and POLYMARKET-SECRET: private /account/* reads.
  • WebSocket authentication: send a single auth message after connecting, then subscribe to private channels.
See Authenticated Sessions.
Each signed request must include a fresh ts request timestamp in milliseconds and salt. Reused or stale values are rejected. Sync against GET /v1/info/time and do not sign requests far in the past or future. The optional expa field caps the validity window.
Deposits and withdrawals are the only operations that move assets in or out of the exchange. Both settle on Polygon. Deposits credit equity as soon as the engine sees them. Withdrawals are signed off-chain and require Equity_after >= IM_required. See Fund Your Account.
Yes. Order placement is not permitted from the United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk, or Luhansk. Builders are responsible for verifying user location before submitting orders.

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Sessions

Sessions affect which set of external feeds is used to compute Index Price and Mark Price. They do not change funding, margin, leverage tiers, order matching, or liquidation triggers. Those run identically around the clock.
  • Disrupted means external feeds are unavailable or failing sanity checks. The system falls back to whatever feed set is still healthy.
  • Halted means the underlying itself has a trading halt or corporate-action freeze.
Both are categorizations of feed-source health and only affect Index and Mark sourcing. The perp continues to match orders.