Ohan

@FundedAndChill obviously i am capable of doing this. you are advocating for something illegal and highly unethical

If someone has the capital to move the price at a specific time, they deserve that win. Heavy manipulation happens in US options markets too; Polymarket is no different—they're essentially just 5m options. You either adapt and take advantage of it, or start manipulating it yourself. Given your skillset, I believe you could easily pull it off, especially on weekends.

At some point, I decided to stop constantly adjusting one of my Polymarket crypto up/down strategies (the one running out of account "ohanism") to deal with market manipulation by toxic participants. This is the outcome. It is still profitable, but you can see that after May 13 it has been much lower Sharpe, much larger, more frequent drawdowns. The main reason is that new classes of manipulators emerged, and I am bleeding large amounts of PnL to their impact. There will be a point when it stops making money entirely, and at that point I will likely turn off rather than constantly adapting. Some thoughts. 1. If you think you have an algo capable of winning in a game with all manipulations, you are lying to yourself. You have an algo capable of dealing with *today's* manipulators. Tomorrow's will be more sophisticated. 2. People can and do make money trading around manipulation. But it's an ever-evolving game that you are playing at a massive disadvantage. 3. I feel confident that I can go back in the code, make significant changes to the way I trade around manipulation, and go back to making a profit. But to what end? Will I need to spend half my week constantly chasing what manipulators are doing next? When will I find time to work on anything else? I would much rather spend my time providing in games where I am not at a structural disadvantage. 4. TWAP will not perfectly solve the problem, but it will help considerably. At the very least, it makes things much more annoying for today's manipulators.

@predict_anon yes, i am saying that a fill at .01 (.99 from your perspective) is less economically meaningful than a fill at .5

Most trades are around 1c spread, not 0.1c; you can check BNB/HYPE/DOGE, the volume for these except for 90c is almost nonexistent. I have a very high market share at both 45-55c and 90c+. The volume at 45-55c is much smaller than that at 90c+. The reasons are: 1. Many people prefer high-odds gambling, so buying 1c-5c allows them to purchase a large share with a small amount of capital. 2. Polymarket's fee at the 50c level is too high, even the most naive gamblers know they can't take orders there. The counterparty on the 90c+ side is mostly retail traders, but at the 50c level, your counterparty is mostly manipulators.

😂看来我的polymarket🚀赚钱之路马上要结束了，退休回归普通的pnl增长速度了 因为自从maker越来越卷后，我的pnl全靠这最后几十秒大交易量刷出来；从市场整体交易量上，你看btc 5m市场， 最后的交易量占比也比前面大的多。 但客观来说，我觉得还是把市场都改twap算了: 1.操纵太多观感确实不好，影响平台形象（当然twap之后，我打赌一天依然会有5%的市场出现操纵，只要shares大于5k就会有） 2.保留两个市场影响流动性，就像poly在15m上搞了个5m，然后现在15m加5m交易量还不如只有原来15m的时候

@0_xMasque @Polymarket @mustafap0ly @devjoshstevens This has been going on for months.

🛑 BREAKING: POLYMARKET MANIPULATION 🛑 Someone very large is currently manipulating 5-minute markets on @Polymarket. I assume that because today is Sunday and most big players (funds and major market makers) are usually not active, there is low liquidity on exchanges. Because of that, someone very large is taking advantage of it and moving BTC price wherever they want. They are basically manipulating the market to farm 5-minute Polymarket markets. I have been observing this for about 2 hours. For example, the “up” position is trading at 65 cents even before the market opens, and when it opens, even while BTC is going down, the “up” position is still trading higher than the “down” position (EVEN THOUGH IT’S FALLING). They accumulate positions for a few minutes, and then BTC suddenly spikes upward. You might ask why I’m not following this and trying to “ride the whale.” Well, I tried, but every time the “outside liquidity” for this whale becomes too large, it screws me over and reverses the price in the other direction. It’s naive to think you can consistently profit on a manipulated market by following the manipulator—because the whole point of the manipulation is to farm small fish like me and you. On weekdays I never noticed this, I assume because other large players are active and it becomes too hard to manipulate BTC price. Take a look at screenshot #1. The market hasn’t even opened yet, but the “down” position is already trading at 66 cents. Now look at screenshot #2. There are about 1 minute and 22 seconds left until the market closes, and the price is going up, but at the same time the “down” position is more expensive than the “up” position. Look at screenshot #3. With 11 seconds left before the candle closes, BTC suddenly dumps sharply, and the Polymarket market closes with a win for the manipulator. His has happened repeatedly in different variations, but the fact remains: this is price manipulation of BTC to farm profits on the 5-minute prediction market. If you care about Polymarket, please share this post so the team notices it and conducts its own investigation into this matter. @shayne_coplan @mustafap0ly @williamlegate @devjoshstevens @digitdustin is this legal? $POLY

@devjoshstevens Hire HFT devs first.

Looking for the best design engineers in the world to work on Polymarket. Polymarket.com is your canvas and your job is making it 1% better every day. Full creative control, own every pixel. DM me your GitHub/portfolio and show me why you're the best in the world.

@dontoverfit i think this sometimes works, but sometimes doesn't depending on which order the matching engine sees the messages? at least i haven't been able to get it to work consistently.

@seemeohan I’m pretty sure you can, you just need to generate the order id using the signed order, and it will match the id received afterwards. I’m not familiar with hyperliquid tho so maybe I didn’t understand what you’re trying to do. But it’s definitely possible to cancel before ack

We desperately need a cancel by client order id on polymarket.

@dontoverfit I don't think we have the equivalent of hyperliquid's cancel by cloid: #cancel-order-s-by-cloid" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">hyperliquid.gitbook.io/hyperliquid-do… if latency is 10s you should be able to cancel before you get a confirm

@seemeohan wdym? don't we have that already

@PolymarketDevs Thank you! Prioritizing quality participants over multi-account taker spam will go a long way to making the BTC 5 minute market tradable again.

Status update. Working through the issues users have flagged. Current focus: - Order placement & cancel latency (P0): two fixes in flight. Spam mitigations + improved order intake (ETA Wednesday). More guardrails on top. - "Not enough balance / allowance" on limit sells (and some buys): multiple fixes shipped, first focused on buys. Major source of sell-limit issue identified with patch in QA, releasing tomorrow - Cancel orders right after a restart: shipping in next week's CLOB release. - 403 on API key creation: working directly with Cloudflare and pulling logs from impacted users. - PnL - Some users have been encountering fluctuating PnL. Position values and average prices should now be correct, and daily/weekly PnL will heal automatically at end of day and end of week UTC time. - Withdrawals failing with "something went wrong": down to a handful of accounts. Deposit-wallet deployment edge case. Ping our bug-report channel in Discord if you hit it. - Deposit wallet generated for users with an existing proxy/safe: edge case when the /users call fails. Patch in QA, shipping next release.

@CSP_Trading @variance_lover i promise you they are

@variance_lover no ones moving binance btc price to rig a 5 minute poly market

Polymarket fixed ghost fills which is good. But the market is still getting farmed in one of the most obvious ways possible. Settlement manipulation on short-term markets (especially BTC 5min) is still wide open. If you’re actually trading these markets, you’ve seen it: - Traders build large positions - Then move BTC (usually via Binance) in the final seconds - Settlement follows that move - They cash out, liquidity providers get run over This isn’t edge-case behavior, it’s consistent and repeatable. And at this point, more money has been made by manipulators running this play than by actual traders providing real liquidity. They are extracting well above 50k a day in btc 5min alone. The result: - Liquidity disappears near settlement - Serious market makers turn off during these windows - Retail sees random last-second flips and loses trust - Market quality degrades Weekends and low-liquidity periods are especially bad, sometimes borderline untradeable. One important point here: Polymarket already uses Chainlink for settlement, which aggregates multiple price feeds. But in practice, that aggregation is still heavily dominated by Binance, and Binance leads most venues. If you can move Binance a few bips at the right moment, the rest follows. That’s exactly what’s being exploited. So while the oracle design sounds robust in theory, in reality it’s still very gameable in short time windows. To be clear: this is a hard problem. But it’s also a very visible one, and there’s been little real acknowledgment or discussion around it. There are ways to mitigate it: - Investigate and ban clearly linked manipulation clusters (many are trackable on-chain) - Work with active traders already monitoring this behavior - Adjust settlement (e.g. short time-weighted averages instead of single-tick pricing) - Reduce reliance on any single venue dominating price feeds On time-weighted averages specifically: Retail often pushes back on this, but I haven’t heard a strong argument for why a short averaging window (e.g. last 30–60s) would be worse than a system that can be flipped in the final seconds. Right now, the current design is clearly exploitable. None of these fixes are perfect, but doing nothing isn’t neutral, it actively pushes liquidity out. And that’s the real issue: You can’t build durable markets if the participants providing liquidity are structurally at a disadvantage. I’ve personally tracked multiple large clusters of accounts running this strategy, including linked funding, coordinated behavior, and PnL data. Happy to share data, examples, and work through potential solutions if the team is open to engaging on this. @devjoshstevens @mustafap0ly @kakujain @PolymarketDevs @Polymarket

@devjoshstevens @variance_lover If you genuinely care about crypto 5M, read this x.com/seemeohan/stat… . You guys can get liquidity and volume back but someone needs to actually care. You need to engage with your top makers who are all beyond frustrated. Also happy to share manip via DM

@variance_lover Appreciate you laying this out. A lot of MMs are pushing for TWAP-based settlement on short-term markets would that address most of what you’re describing? And yes, open to seeing the data.

@variance_lover @devjoshstevens now if they can do something about clob latency...

Kinda crazy how ghost fill rates got to 30%! That said, it does seem that for now the issue is under control and I am hopeful for the future that these things will be taken seriously. Thanks @devjoshstevens

@variance_lover Agree with all this. I put some thoughts on BTC 5 minute in particular here, which I think is the worst affected. x.com/seemeohan/stat…

I’ve been one of the biggest market makers on Polymarket for a long time. At peak I was doing $10M+ daily volume and paying thousands in fees every single day. The current state is the worst the platform has ever felt. Ghost fills still everywhere. Markets constantly breaking. Payouts randomly missing. Exploits going on for months while the team says “it’s fixed”. You spend more time defending against bugs than actually trading. Meanwhile, communication is a joke. They say “we’re listening” → ignore emails, ignore DMs. They say “we’ll work with top users” → instead it’s random private Telegram groups with whoever shouts the loudest. They say “issue fixed” → it clearly isn’t. At some point you stop believing anything they say. The fee situation is another one. If you’re generating serious volume and paying serious fees (thousands a day), most exchanges shower you with attention and perks. I'm not asking for that but would be nice to at least be acknowledged that you exist and have basic communication, especially after they've announced publicly multiple times that they will start doing this. Instead we got a week-long hype campaign for a “big update” that turned out to be… a hidden fee increase. How dumb do you think your users are? And then stuff like April 5th, missed referral/rebate payments, no announcement, no explanation, nothing. Just silence. That’s not a bug, that’s trust damage. The bigger issue is it feels like nobody on the team has actual trading experience. The design decisions show it. Every update introduces new edge cases, new exploits, new ways to break the order book. People have made many millions exploiting this stuff. Many of these accounts are obvious, trackable, preventable. The community has been pointing it out for months. Ignored. Only now that the markets are borderline unusable does it seem like there’s urgency. Right now the platform is honestly close to untradeable: – ghost fills – manipulation – unreliable payouts – constant bugs – zero transparency And surprise, volume is dropping. Meanwhile Kalshi is catching up fast (have basically overtaken in volume in almost every category except for politics) and Hyperliquid is entering with a team that actually understands trading systems. I want Polymarket to succeed. And yes, maybe the upcoming ghost fill fix helps. But if this pattern continues, terrible communication, fake timelines, ignoring core users, then this won’t be a place serious traders stick around. You can’t build a market while eroding the trust of the people who provide the liquidity, especially not as a many multi billion dollar company! I have spoken to many large polymarket whales (of which a considerable amount have already given up on the platform) and they all share this sentiment. @Polymarket @mustafap0ly @SuhailKakar @_kanarazu_