Add more oracles, Polymarket's ambitions exposed

Odaily Planet Daily（@OdailyChina）

Author｜Azuma（@azuma_eth）

On the evening of April 2, prediction market leader Polymarket officially announced that it will integrate oracle service Pyth Network. The latter will become the settlement data source for a batch of newly launched 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 a dozen-plus U.S. stocks including Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, Coinbase, and Palantir, along with major stock market indices and certain exchange-traded funds (ETFs)—such as “whether gold will go up or down in this hour,” “whether silver will be higher than or lower than a target price at a certain time point”……

Pyth Network will provide real-time price data via 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.

In the statement, Mustafa Aljadery, Polymarket’s product lead, said: “Prediction outcomes worth millions of dollars often hinge on a single price point, so it is necessary to ensure the data source is absolutely accurate. Pyth Network provides that assurance, enabling Polymarket to further expand into high-risk financial markets.”

Polymarket’s path to oracle expansion

This is not Polymarket expanding its oracle service.

In its early days, Polymarket relied mainly 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 final ruling. This mechanism is especially well-suited for unstructured events with strong subjectivity and no single standard answer, such as political elections, policy changes, social hot topics, and so on.

However, subjective judgment also means there is room for controversy. Historically, Polymarket has repeatedly faced community discussions about manipulation risk and fairness due to settlement disputes involving UMA.

In September 2025, when Polymarket began pushing crypto price-up/down events as a priority, it urgently needed to introduce a more deterministic data source to reduce the possibility of human intervention. To that end, Polymarket chose to partner with Chainlink at the time, combining the use of Chainlink Data Streams (responsible for providing low-latency market prices with timestamps) and Chainlink Automation (responsible for executing on-chain result settlement at preset times). This allows markets for crypto assets such as BTC and ETH on top of Polymarket to settle automatically and quickly, while also enabling users to view low-latency, verifiable prices for the relevant assets in real time.

In a sense, integrating with Chainlink was Polymarket’s first move to extend its reach from “socialized consensus predictions” to “automated price judgments,” but Polymarket’s goal is 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, while Pyth Pro obtains data from the highest-quality data publishers in the network, including Jump Trading, Blue Ocean, LMAX, Jane Street, and others. Perhaps precisely considering its global market characteristics, Polymarket this time ultimately selected Pyth Network as its data source for traditional financial assets.

Polymarket’s ambition spotted

With the collaboration 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 oracle pricing of on-chain assets such as BTC and ETH, as well as automated price settlement;
• Pyth Network: traditional finance layer, providing high-frequency traditional asset price data for U.S. equities, commodities, indices, and more.

From UMA, representing non-standard events, to Chainlink, focusing on crypto-native markets, and now to Pyth Network, concentrating on global financial markets, each time Polymarket introduces a new oracle service, it is pushing the platform toward a broader market. In essence, expanding oracles is expanding “a tradable future”—the more data sources there are, the more dimensions of the real world get included in what can be wagered on.

If this logic continues to develop, the markets Polymarket could potentially incorporate in the future are almost without limit. Macroeconomic data, company financial reports, sports events, weather changes, and even AI model releases can all be connected through different oracles. As long as there is a verifiable data source, corresponding markets can be constructed. Uncertainty in the real world will be broken down, again and again, into events that can be bet on.

From this perspective, Polymarket’s endgame may be far more than a simple prediction market, but rather a “future trading platform” that can cover all uncertainties. When all kinds of uncertain events can be uniformly brought into the same mechanism, everything can be bet on, and everything can also be priced. Oracles are merely a technical expansion, but what they point to is a one-stop super platform that is coming into view—far beyond what anyone expected.