Polymarket targets November launch for new trading engine – What changes in Q4?

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 at Polymarket, the new trading platform that will power PM and perps will be released in Q4. 

On the exact timeline, Stevens said that the end-to-end order book system will be out by October, and tests, including market maker access, will be done 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.

Why Polymarket is building a new trading system

The new Rust CLOB (Central Limit Order Book) is a new order book matching system that Stevens believes will resolve the issues and outages that Polymarket is currently experiencing. 

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.

At that time, he said that the “hacked together” design would mean that if they tried to fix one thing, another would go wrong.

In the past three months, its trading system, including PM and perpetuals, has experienced several issues. For example, in early September, it experienced a prediction trading API issue that took 9 hours to resolve. 

The perps trading side of the system also faced some operational hiccups in August and September. 

Interestingly, the platform carried out a V2 engine upgrade in April, allowing support for a USDC-backed stablecoin, Polymarket USD. Additionally, the upgrade scaled executions from +1K orders per second to over 10K orders per second while reducing average transaction costs.

Still, the system faced uptime issues mentioned above. Steven blamed them on the old system that was running things. In fact, he cited it as the main reason they haven’t scaled Polymarket Perps, launched earlier this month. 

To avoid these issues and extend its scaling, Stevens opted to build an entirely new Rust CLOB-based DeFi engine. According to him, this will help the platform handle the growing PM and perps trading volume. 

As of September, Polymarket U.S. weekly volumes have surged to a record high of nearly $800 million.

Interestingly, the overall prediction market volume has hit a record high of $63 billion in September ahead of the U.S. midterm election. However, Polymarket Perps daily volume has remained below $150 million. It remains to be seen if the Q4 upgrade will boost its perps demand. 

Separately, the market was pricing only a 6% chance of the much-awaited POLY token being released before 2027. 

Final Summary

• Polymarket plans to debut its new trading engine in November.
• Polymarket execs believe they’ll scale perps volume in Q4 from the current $150 million daily volume.