Core Entities
Events
A top-level question or topic on Polymarket. An event contains one or more markets (outcomes). For example, “Who will win the 2024 US Presidential Election?” is an event — the individual candidates are markets within it.
Events can be filtered by status, category, tags, and series. They include aggregate trading metrics and metadata like whether they’re active, featured, or live.
Markets
A single tradeable outcome within an event. Each market has a binary yes/no structure with a price between 0 and 1 representing the implied probability. Markets are identified by their condition ID.
For example, within the presidential election event, “Will Trump win?” is one market and “Will Harris win?” is another.
Series
A grouping of related events that recur over time. Weekly “Bitcoin price” events or a seasonal set of political events might be grouped into a series. Series can track external price feeds via Pyth or Chainlink integrations.
Labels used to categorize events by topic (e.g., “US Politics”, “Crypto”, “Sports”). Events can have multiple tags. Use tags to filter and discover events.
Trading Concepts
Shares
Tokenized units representing a claim on a specific outcome. If the outcome resolves to “Yes”, each share pays out 1 USDC. If it resolves to “No”, each share is worth 0. The price of a share reflects the market’s implied probability.
Trades
An executed transaction on a market — a buy or sell of outcome shares. Each trade records the price, size, side (buy/sell), and the trader who executed it. Trades have three types:
| Type | Description |
|---|
| OrderFilled | A standard trade matched on the CLOB |
| Redemption | Redeeming winning shares for USDC after resolution |
| Merge | Merging complementary outcome tokens back into collateral |
Bonds
A view of markets through a fixed-income lens. The bonds endpoint surfaces markets where the expected return and time-to-resolution create a yield-like profile, including APY (annualized percentage yield) and return percentage.
Candlesticks
Standard OHLCV (Open, High, Low, Close, Volume) price bars for charting a market’s price history. Available in resolutions from 1 minute to 1 day.
Holders
Traders who currently hold shares in a specific market outcome. The holders endpoint provides position sizes, average entry prices, unrealized PnL, and scoring data.
Resolution
The process of determining the final outcome of a market. Once resolved, winning shares can be redeemed for 1 USDC each. Markets can be resolved manually or automatically.
Identifiers
condition_id
The primary identifier for a market. Derived from Polymarket’s Conditional Token Framework (CTF) smart contracts on Polygon. Every endpoint that references a specific market uses this ID.
position_id
The token ID for a specific outcome within a market. Each outcome (e.g., “Yes” or “No”) has its own position ID, corresponding to an ERC-1155 token on Polygon. Used for candlestick queries and trade filtering.
slug
A URL-friendly, human-readable string used to identify events, markets, series, and tags. Example: will-bitcoin-hit-100k-by-december. Used as a path parameter in several endpoints.
Infrastructure Terms
USDC
USD Coin, a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the US Dollar. All monetary values on Polymarket — volumes, trade amounts, position values, PnL — are denominated in USDC.
CLOB
Central Limit Order Book. Polymarket’s order-matching system that matches buy and sell orders at specific prices, as opposed to an AMM (Automated Market Maker).
Neg Risk
A framework for multi-outcome events where the sum of all outcome probabilities must equal 1. Buying “No” on one outcome is economically equivalent to buying “Yes” on all other outcomes. Used for events with more than two mutually exclusive outcomes.
PnL
Profit and Loss. Unrealized PnL is the paper profit/loss on positions still held. Realized PnL is the actual profit/loss from closed trades or redemptions.
Trader Scoring
Struct classifies and scores traders to help you identify patterns in market activity.
| Score | Description |
|---|
| Smart Money | Ranks traders by historical accuracy and profitability. Higher scores indicate consistently profitable predictions. |
| Insider Score | Flags activity patterns consistent with trading on non-public information. |
| Bot Classification | Detects automated trading bots with a confidence score and reasoning. |
Last modified on February 16, 2026
