tsm

One of our complaints from traders: the UI optimised orders for speed, not correctness. Some flows updated positions before the exchange responded, then corrected them later if the order was partially filled or failed, but this caused late updates, incorrect states, and failed sells. Now that our indexing and data API is much more performant, we changed this so that market buys and sells wait for the trade response; fills, partial fills, rejections and errors show immediately. This also improves correctness and sell success rate, making it safer and better to trade.

Honest post: the Polymarket DeFi CLOB is full of tech debt. It grew fast, got hacked together, and most of the team inherited it that way. Since joining and building out the team, we have scaled it 10x and made it 3x faster, but it’s not enough; the core foundations of how it’s been built are wrong in almost every way. You try to fix one thing, and another thing goes wrong; the conclusion now is that the codebase can’t be saved long-term. The exchange is the heart of Polymarket; everything runs through it. If we want to be the best exchange in the world, it must be fast, stable, and scalable. We can’t keep patching the old one, where these core foundations are generally missing throughout, so we’re rewriting it from scratch in Rust. Early numbers: 10-20x faster on p99 than today, 200,000 orders per second (15x what we have now, with room to reach 400,000+), and stability under load. This will put us faster than most exchanges, including CEXs. Building it in Rust gives us memory safety with no garbage collector. No GC means no random pauses and no random latency spikes; the tail latency in the benchmarks is the tail latency you get in production, alongside a strict compiler that enforces correctness up front. Data races and memory corruption (the bugs that take exchanges down) can’t exist in the first place. Polymarket has to take it seriously that we are an exchange; this is people’s money, not a joke. To succeed, we have to fix this; otherwise, we will fail. It’s as simple as that. I joined to build the best software in the world, not to maintain some of the worst, and I will do everything I can to make Polymarket a serious exchange. We are aiming to have the exchange ready sometime in Q4 (mid to end). I'll communicate progress as we go so you all know the status. Breaking changes will be minimal for all integrators and will be communicated in advance. We will maintain the existing CLOB and keep trying to improve it as we build this side by side. We can’t wait to throw away the existing CLOB; we dislike it as much as you all do. Make Polymarket fast, finally.

No polymarket or UMA contracts have been exploited. All user funds are safe, and using Polymarket.com is safe, so business as usual. We had a 6-year-old private key that was compromised. This was in the internal top-up config, which is why funds were being sent to it. We have rotated this key, revoked all prod permissions and are moving all PKs to KMS keys from now on.