Add more oracles, Polymarket's ambitions exposed

Original | Odaily Planet Daily Report（@OdailyChina）

Author｜Azuma（@azuma_eth）

In the evening of April 2, Polymarket’s official announcement said it will integrate oracle service Pyth Network. The latter will become the settlement data source for a new batch of prediction events related to traditional assets on Polymarket.

According to statements from Polymarket and Pyth Network, this batch of events will first cover commodities such as gold, silver, WTI crude oil, and natural gas, as well as more than a dozen U.S. stocks including Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, Coinbase, Palantir, and major stock indexes and some exchange-traded funds (ETFs)—for example, “Will gold be up or down this hour?”, “Will silver be higher than or lower than a target price before a certain time point”……

Pyth Network will provide real-time price data through WebSocket. Polymarket will sample this data every second and publish it as real-time charts, allowing traders to continuously see where the market stands relative to their own positions.

Polymarket product lead Mustafa Aljadery said in the statement: “Prediction outcomes of millions of dollars often depend on a single price point, so we must ensure the data source is absolutely accurate. Pyth Network provides this assurance, enabling Polymarket to further expand into high-risk financial markets.”

Polymarket’s path to oracle expansion

This is not about Polymarket expanding its oracle services.

In its early stage, Polymarket mainly relied on UMA’s Optimistic Oracle mechanism. UMA’s logic is essentially a “social consensus oracle”—proposers submit results, challengers raise disputes, and voters ultimately make the ruling. This mechanism is highly suitable for unstructured events with strong subjectivity and no single standard answer, such as political elections, policy changes, and social hot topics.

However, subjective judgment also means there is room for controversy. Historically, Polymarket has repeatedly faced community discussions about manipulation risk and fairness arising from UMA’s settlement disputes.

In September 2025, when Polymarket began to strongly promote crypto market up/down prediction events, it urgently needed to introduce a more deterministic data source to reduce the possibility of human intervention. For this reason, Polymarket then chose to partner with Chainlink by combining the use of Chainlink Data Streams (responsible for providing low-latency market prices with timestamps) and Chainlink Automation (responsible for executing on-chain settlement of results at preset times). This enables markets for crypto asset up/down events such as BTC and ETH on Polymarket to settle automatically and quickly, while also allowing users to view the relevant assets’ low-latency, verifiable prices in real time.

In a sense, integrating with Chainlink was Polymarket’s first step in extending its reach from “socialized consensus forecasting” to “automated price judgment,” but Polymarket’s goals are clearly not limited to the crypto market.

Compared with Chainlink, Pyth Network’s distinguishing feature is that its data feeds are directly provided by trading firms, exchanges, market makers, and banks worldwide. These institutions actively participate in pricing in global markets, and Pyth Pro then obtains data from the network’s highest-quality data providers, including Jump Trading, Blue Ocean, LMAX, and Jane Street, among others. Perhaps precisely because of its global market characteristics, Polymarket ultimately selected Pyth Network as the data source for traditional financial assets this time.

Polymarket’s ambitions in view

With the partnership with Pyth Network finalized, Polymarket has formed a clear set of multi-layer oracle architecture:

• UMA: non-standard event layer, responsible for politics, society, breaking news, and macro events;
• Chainlink: crypto asset layer, responsible for pricing feeds for on-chain assets such as BTC and ETH, as well as automated price settlement;
• Pyth Network: traditional finance layer, where institutions provide high-frequency traditional asset price data such as U.S. stocks, commodities, and indexes.

From UMA, which represents non-standard events, to Chainlink, which focuses on crypto-native markets, and now to Pyth Network, which is focused on global financial markets, every time Polymarket introduces a new oracle service, it is pushing the platform toward broader markets. Expanding oracles is, in essence, expanding “tradable futures”—the more data sources there are, the more dimensions in the real world become eligible to be included in betting.

If this logic continues, the markets Polymarket could include in the future are almost without limit. Macro-economic data, company earnings reports, sports events, changes in weather, and even AI model releases can all be connected through different oracles. As long as there is a verifiable data source, the corresponding market can be built. The uncertainties of the real world will be continuously broken down into events that can be bet on.

From this perspective, Polymarket’s endgame may be far more than just a prediction market—it is a “future trading platform” that can cover all uncertainties. When all kinds of uncertain events can be unified under the same mechanism, everything can be bet on, and everything can be priced. Oracles are a technical extension, but what they point to is a one-stop super platform that is becoming visible—far beyond what anyone could have predicted.