BlockBeats reported on July 30th that prediction market Polymarket announced a major overhaul of its cryptocurrency price fluctuation settlement mechanism, effective August 7th, to protect market integrity. Starting at midnight UTC on that day, affected markets will no longer settle based on a single-point-of-time price snapshot, but will instead use a time-weighted average price. Different timeframes will correspond to different TWAP windows: all 5-minute markets will use 30-second TWAP, 15-minute markets will use 60-second TWAP, and 4-hour markets will also use 60-second TWAP. Previously, the single-snapshot settlement method was prone to price manipulation during periods of low liquidity. This change represents Polymarket's proactive strengthening of its market integrity system following a series of regulatory scrutiny.
To support this transition, Polymarket will inject $1 million in liquidity rewards into all affected markets throughout August. Technically, Chainlink TWAP testnet data streams are already available, and mainnet data streams and Polymarket real-time data stream services will launch on August 4th. At that time, developers can directly obtain TWAP prices through Chainlink Data Streams or by exposing WebSockets on Polymarket.