Polymarket prepares major infrastructure overhaul to sustain US election traffic surge

Polymarket, the prominent crypto betting platform, is undertaking a comprehensive technology rebuild to cope with increased traffic and improve stability amid its rapid growth, including a potentia...

Polymarket is overhauling the technical foundations that helped turn it into one of the most closely watched crypto betting platforms. What began as a lean product built on USDC and Polygon’s low-cost Layer 2 network is now coping with far heavier traffic, after a surge in activity around the 2024 US presidential election and a valuation that reportedly jumped to $9 billion following an investment from Intercontinental Exchange last year.

The scale of that growth has exposed strain in the system. In a post on X on 25 April, Josh Stevens, who joined Polymarket as vice-president of engineering for DeFi only three weeks earlier, said the platform’s popularity had far outstripped its infrastructure. Among the remedies he outlined was a chain migration, which he said would give the company more block space, lower gas costs and much faster settlement times.

Stevens did not say which network Polymarket may move to, and there has been no formal announcement from the company on that point. According to a source cited by TheStreet Roundtable, Polygon is still working with Polymarket to ease the pressure on the current setup. Even so, the engineering team appears focused on a broader rebuild rather than a single fix.

The planned changes go well beyond the question of where transactions are settled. Stevens said Polymarket is reworking on-chain data latency, addressing failed or cancelled trades, and redesigning its website for greater speed and stability. He also said the company is putting in proper observability and alerting systems so outages are detected internally rather than by market makers, which he described as unacceptable. Underpinning that effort is a full rebuild of the central limit order book, which he called the most important project the team is undertaking.

Other reports suggest the platform is also expanding its technical stack in parallel. KuCoin and other industry outlets have said Polymarket is developing a unified TypeScript SDK, a new contract system and a perpetuals framework, while recruiting staff across QA automation, developer tooling, internal tooling and data engineering. Separate reports have also pointed to a move from bridged USDC.e to native USDC on Polygon, a shift that would reduce dependence on cross-chain bridges and is meant to improve capital efficiency, security and settlement consistency. For now, the message from Polymarket is clear: the platform that once won on simplicity is now trying to win on scale.

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Source: Noah Wire Services