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Plain-English answers to the common Polymarket questions. Built from what people actually search.
What is Polymarket?
Polymarket is a prediction market where people trade shares that pay out $1 if an outcome happens and $0 if it doesn't. Prices sit between 0¢ and 100¢ and behave like odds — a share trading at 62¢ means the market's collective view is a 62% chance. It settles to on-chain oracles and runs on Polygon, so every trade, position, and wallet is public by default. That public record is what Polyranks reads.
What is a prediction market?
A prediction market is a marketplace where the traded item is the outcome of a future event — an election, a game, a weather reading, a policy decision. Buyers and sellers set the price through supply and demand, and the collective price becomes the market's forecast. Unlike a sportsbook, the counterparty is another trader, not the house, so liquidity and sharp participants move the price instead of a bookmaker's line.
What are sharp wallets on Polymarket?
Sharp wallets are the traders whose historical positions beat the market consistently — they enter before consensus moves, size into edges, and cut losers fast. On Polyranks we score wallets by season PnL, realized win-rate, volume, and edge entry (how early they got in relative to the final close). A wallet doesn't need to be the largest to be sharp; the ones worth watching are the ones whose entries predict where price is going.
Kalshi vs Polymarket — what's the difference?
Both are prediction markets but the plumbing differs. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange based in the US with USD deposits and KYC on every trader — good for accredited access, less good for anonymity and granularity. Polymarket settles on Polygon in USDC, every wallet is public, and markets span sports, politics, crypto, weather, and news. For intelligence (what is smart money doing right now), Polymarket's on-chain transparency is hard to beat.
How do I find sharp Polymarket traders?
Open the Ranking page and sort by composite score — that combines season PnL, realized win-rate, and volume. Don't just copy the #1 wallet; read the profile to see what categories they trade, how long their positions stay open, and whether they enter early or late. A wallet that grinds out 58% win-rate on NBA live markets is a different animal from one that caught a single election whale-sized payout.
How do I track Polymarket whales?
Polyranks surfaces wallets by volume on each market drawer — the ones moving the price are the ones worth watching. You can open a wallet's profile page at /trader/<address> to see their open positions, recent trades, and realized PnL. We refresh every 30–60 seconds on live markets. No login, no copy-trading, no signing required — just read the public record.
What is the Polymarket API?
Polymarket exposes a REST API at gamma-api.polymarket.com (markets/metadata) and a CLOB WebSocket for live prices and orderbooks. Historical trade data is most complete via direct on-chain indexing (Polygon logs) rather than the public API. Polyranks runs its own indexer on Envio HyperSync against the on-chain events, which is why our trader PnL matches Polymarket's official dashboards.
How is Polymarket different from a sportsbook?
Sportsbooks set a line and profit from the spread; prediction markets let traders set the price against each other. There's no house margin on Polymarket — only a small fee on liquidity. A sportsbook limits sharp accounts; Polymarket rewards them, because sharp liquidity is what keeps prices honest. For tracking and analytics, the key difference is transparency: every position on Polymarket is a public on-chain record, which is why Polyranks can exist at all.
What is smart money on Polymarket?
Smart money is the set of wallets whose trades consistently foreshadow where a market price ends up. On Polyranks we label wallets sharp when their 30-day realized win-rate and entry-edge both stay above the pool median. It's not about being loudest or largest — a patient $500 wallet with 64% realized win-rate is sharper than a $100k wallet that churns at break-even.
Can I copy-trade Polymarket wallets?
Polyranks is read-only by design. We show you who's trading what, how early they entered, and whether the pattern has held historically, so you can make informed decisions — not automate them. Copy-trading adds execution risk, slippage, and lag, all of which erode the original wallet's edge. Intelligence first, execution later.
Is Polymarket available in the US?
Access depends on your jurisdiction and how the site is configured to serve your region — rules change. Polyranks is an intelligence layer on top of the public on-chain data, not a Polymarket client. If you can't access Polymarket itself, you can still read wallet activity, market flow, and sharp signals here without depositing or trading.
What does Polyranks actually show?
Three things. (1) A wallet ranking scored on season PnL, win-rate, and volume. (2) A sharp consensus view per live match — which direction the high-signal wallets are leaning and by how much. (3) A portfolio tracker so you can watch your own positions (or paste any wallet) without signing in. Everything is read-only. We don't place trades and we don't send your wallet to Polymarket.