Polymarket Glossary — CLOB, CTF, FAK, UMA & 70+ Terms
Plain-English definitions of every Polymarket term you need: CLOB, CTF, FAK orders, UMA resolution, USDC, pUSD, midpoint, spread, leg risk, gasless trading, builder API, and more. Built for arbitrage traders.
2
A
B
- Best bid / ask
The highest standing buy price and the lowest standing sell price on the order book.
- Binary market
A prediction market with exactly two complementary outcomes.
- Binary spread
The gap between $1.00 and the sum of best-ask YES + NO on a binary market.
- Builder
A third party that routes orders through the CLOB with attribution and earns fees.
C
- CFTC
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
- CLOB
Central Limit Order Book — a matching engine that pairs buyers and sellers via a continuous order book.
- CLOB API
Polymarket's order book and trading API.
- CLOB token ID
The identifier of a specific outcome token in the CLOB.
- Combinatorial spread
The gap between $1.00 and the sum of best-ask prices across all multi-outcome legs.
- Condition ID
The on-chain identifier of a CTF condition.
- Cookie storage
A wagmi storage adapter that persists wallet state to cookies for SSR.
- Cross-platform arbitrage
Exploiting price differences for the same event across different venues.
- CTF
Gnosis's ERC-1155 standard for outcome tokens.
- Cursor pagination
A pagination strategy that uses opaque tokens instead of numeric offsets.
D
E
- Edge
The mathematical profit baked into a trade before fees and slippage.
- EIP-6963
An Ethereum standard for multi-wallet provider discovery.
- Endgame trade
Buying outcomes priced near $1.00 close to resolution to harvest short-dated yield.
- ERC-1155
A multi-token standard supporting fungible and non-fungible tokens.
- ERC-20
The fungible token standard on Ethereum-compatible chains.
- Expected value
The probability-weighted average payoff of a trade.
F
G
H
K
L
M
- Maker fee
A fee or rebate paid to or from the order that adds liquidity.
- Market Channel
The Polymarket WebSocket channel that streams market data.
- Market slug
The URL-safe identifier for a market or event.
- Merge
Burn a complete set of outcome tokens and receive $1.00 of pUSD.
- MetaMask
A popular browser-extension and mobile self-custody wallet.
- Midpoint
The arithmetic mean of the best bid and best ask.
- Multi-leg execution
Sending several orders together that depend on each other to lock a position.
- Multi-outcome market
A prediction market with more than two mutually exclusive outcomes.
O
- OFAC
The US Office of Foreign Assets Control.
- Open interest
The total notional value of outstanding outcome tokens.
- Order attribution
Attaching metadata to orders that identifies the routing source.
- Order book
The list of resting bids and asks at each price level on an exchange.
- Order book depth
The cumulative size available at and beyond the top of book.
P
- Polygon
The Polygon PoS chain (chain ID 137) that hosts Polymarket's contracts.
- Price history
Time-series prices for an outcome token.
- Proxy wallet
A lightweight smart-contract wallet that auto-deploys on the user's first transaction.
- pUSD
Polymarket's wrapped USDC, the actual trading currency on the platform.
R
- RainbowKit
A wallet-connect UI library for wagmi.
- Rate limit
A cap on the number of requests an API will accept in a window.
- Redeem
Burn winning outcome tokens after resolution to receive $1.00 each.
- Relayer
The Gas Station Network that sponsors Polymarket transactions so users never pay gas.
- Resolution
The reporting of an outcome by the oracle, after which winning tokens become redeemable.
- Risk-defined
A trade whose maximum loss is known and bounded at entry.
S
- Safe vs Proxy
The two wallet types Polymarket offers: a pre-deployed Gnosis Safe (Safe) and an on-demand Proxy wallet (Proxy).
- Safe wallet
A Gnosis Safe smart wallet pre-deployed for the user on Polymarket.
- Slippage
The difference between expected and actual fill price.
- Split
Mint a complete set of outcome tokens from $1.00 of pUSD.
- Spread
The difference between best ask and best bid.
- Subscription limit
The maximum number of instruments a single WebSocket connection can stream.
T
- Taker fee
A fee charged to the order that removes liquidity from the book.
- Taker-only fee schedule
A fee model where only liquidity‑removing orders are charged.
- Tick size
The minimum price increment for a market.
- tick_size_change event
A WebSocket event signalling that the minimum price increment (tick size) for a market changed.
- Tickless execution
Execution that does not respect a fixed price increment.