Polymarket is planning a complete overhaul of its trading platform, deploying a new Rust-based Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) to address persistent outages and scaling issues. VP of Engineering Josh Stevens confirmed the new system will be released in Q4, with the order book ready by October and market maker tests in November. The current CLOB, described as “hacked together,” has caused multiple problems, including a 9-hour API outage in September. The upgrade aims to support growing volume, which hit nearly $800 million weekly in the U.S. and a record $63 billion overall in September ahead of the midterm election. Perpetuals daily volume remains below $150 million, and the market gives only a 6% chance of the POLY token launching before 2027.
Polymarket is aggressively positioning for the next bull market cycle with a planned overhaul of its trading platform. According to Josh Stevens, VP of Engineering, the new platform that will power prediction markets and perpetual contracts will be released in Q4.
Stevens said the end-to-end order book system will be out by October, with tests including market maker access completed in November. He added, “November-migration cutover plan locked, with 2x full rehearsals before we flip anything. If all goes well, we then release it.”
The new Rust CLOB is a central limit order book matching system that Stevens believes will resolve current issues and outages. He stated, “The current CLOB is the system behind most of the issues we see today, so we’ve got all hands on deck building the new one.”
Last month, the engineering lead said Polymarket had “hacked together” its DeFi CLOB, making it difficult to scale and improve performance. This design meant that fixing one thing often broke another.
Over the past three months, both prediction markets and perpetuals experienced several problems. In early September, a prediction trading API issue took nine hours to resolve. The perps side also faced operational hiccups as reported on its status page in August and September.
Despite a V2 engine upgrade in April that scaled executions from 1,000 to over 10,000 orders per second and reduced transaction costs, the system still suffered downtime. Stevens blamed the old system, citing it as the main reason they have not scaled Polymarket Perps, which launched earlier this month.
As of September, Polymarket U.S. weekly volumes surged to a record high of nearly $800 million. Overall prediction market volume hit a record high of $63 billion in September ahead of the U.S. midterm election.
However, Polymarket Perps daily volume remained below $150 million. Separately, the market was pricing only a 6% chance of the much-awaited POLY token being released before 2027.
