Polymarket vs Limitless vs Myriad: who decides, and what the fee is a percentage of

Three answers to one question, and the failure modes are what separate them

Every other difference between these three is downstream of who determines the outcome, and the three answers have nothing in common.

Polymarket resolves nothing itself. The UMA optimistic oracle does: anyone may propose an outcome by posting a bond, typically 750 pUSD, there is a two-hour challenge period, one dispute sends it to a second proposal round, and a second dispute escalates to a vote of UMA token holders. There is no route from that vote back to the company.

Limitless splits the job three ways and prints which one applies on the market page. Pyth Network resolves the majority of markets automatically at the deadline. Chainlink TWAP resolves the 5- and 15-minute crypto markets against a time-weighted average, so a momentary spike at the boundary does not decide them alone. Everything else — sports, politics, anything custom — is resolved by hand by the Limitless team, typically 24 to 72 hours after close.

Myriad has no oracle at any point. The team resolves every market against the source named in that market's rules, which the API returns as a URL, usually within minutes of expiry and up to 48 hours.

So far this is on the cards. What is not on any of them is the comparison of what happens when the resolution is wrong, and the three outcomes are genuinely different products:

• Polymarket. A token-holder vote decided against you, and that is the answer. There is no support ticket that reverses it. You can buy your way into the process with a bond and two hours of attention, which is more than the other two offer — but the ceiling on that process is a vote you do not control.
• Limitless. If a market resolves to the wrong side, holders of the side that should have won get back what they paid for the shares — the cost basis, not the $1 payout — while whoever was paid out on the wrong side keeps the money, because settlement happened on-chain and cannot be clawed back. Being right and being misresolved still costs you the trade: you are made whole on the stake and not on the win.
• Myriad. A market that cannot be resolved fairly is voided, returning your position at its market value at the moment of cancellation — which may be more or less than you paid. Your exposure is not to your entry price but to wherever the price happened to be standing when somebody pulled the market.

Three failure modes: a vote, your entry price, the last price. Choose one before you choose a fee schedule. Who decides the outcome covers the general shape.

One more asymmetry worth naming. Limitless's automated half is the only resolution on this page with no human in the loop at all, and it covers the majority of its listing — which makes it both the fastest and the least arguable of the three. That advantage evaporates on precisely the markets it does not cover, where Limitless becomes the same shape as Myriad: the operator decides, and the recourse is an email or a Discord message.

Who is on the other side, and why that decides which number matters

Two of these three run an order book and one runs a curve, and the distinction is not a detail of implementation — it changes which published number is the cost.

Polymarket is a central limit order book on Polygon. You trade against other users. Collateral is pUSD, an ERC-20 backed one-for-one by USDC and enforced on-chain; outcome shares are ERC-1155 tokens, so one Yes plus one No always redeems for a dollar.

Limitless runs separate YES and NO books on Base, collateralised in USDC, with AMM markets alongside them. The book is what the venue is built around and where its fee schedule is most complicated.

Myriad is the curve. Every market its public API returned on 19 September 2026 was priced by the AMM, where outcome prices sum to 1 and move as people buy and sell. Its card carries both facts at once — liquidity_model: amm and order_book: true — because a book does exist, with its own contracts on BNB Smart Chain, its own API and WebSocket, and it is the model behind in-play markets. It was simply not what the sampled listing used.

On a curve the published fee is the smaller half of the cost. Your price is a function of your own size against the depth of that specific market, nobody publishes it as a rate, and on a thin market it is routinely larger than the fee. Myriad's own card gives the range: under 10,000 USDC of volume on the open Linea market sampled, against several million on the featured BNB Chain markets. A 0.5% fee on one of those and a 0.5% fee on the other are not the same trade. Quote your own order before you compare anything.

The same card also adds a flat 0.0085 USD per transaction for gas. Flat charges invert as size falls: on anything under about 85 cents of notional the gas line is larger than the 1% fee it sits beside. Where liquidity comes from has the depth numbers to ask for.

The fee numbers are quoted in three different units

This is the trap on this page, and it has caught people before. All three publish a percentage. None of the three percentages is a percentage of the same thing.

• Polymarket publishes a coefficient, multiplied by contracts × price × (1 − price). It is a rate on expected earnings, so the charge peaks at the midpoint and vanishes at both ends. By category: 0.07 crypto, 0.05 sports, economics, culture, weather and the general bucket, 0.04 finance, politics, mentions and tech, and zero on geopolitics. Makers are never charged, and fee revenue funds a daily maker rebate.
• Limitless publishes a percentage of what the fill cost. Order-book buys: a flat 3.00% from a penny all the way to 50 cents, then falling — 1.51% at 70, 1.05% at 80, 0.68% at 90, 0.42% at 99. Order-book sells peak at 1.50% at the midpoint. AMM markets: a flat 0.40%. Makers pay nothing; a limit order that rests is free.
• Myriad publishes a percentage of the amount you put in, set per market. AMM buys run 0% to 2%: of the 39 open stablecoin markets read through the public API on 19 September 2026, 32 charged 1% on a buy and nothing on a sell, and 7 charged nothing at all; every points-denominated market charged nothing. The order book peaks at 1.5% at the midpoint and decays linearly, with makers rebated the taker fee.

So "3.00%" against "0.05" is not a comparison of anything. The tell for the unit is simple: a rate that would exceed the contract's own price somewhere on its curve is a rate on the fill, not on the payout. Limitless holding 3.00% at a one-cent contract would otherwise mean a three-cent fee on a one-cent contract.

The catalogue converts all of it to one measure — one contract at 50 cents, as a percentage of the $1.00 a winner pays — which is what economics.fees_taker means on every card here. On that basis the fields read Myriad 0.5, Polymarket 1.25, Limitless 1.5. What a trade actually costs works through all four units in circulation.

And that ranking only holds at 50 cents. The shapes cross:

• Limitless's order-book buy costs 3% of the price, so 0.03 × price per contract. Polymarket's default 0.05 category costs 0.05 × price × (1 − price). They are equal when 1 − price = 0.6 — at 40 cents. Below that, the venue with the largest printed number is the cheaper one: at 10 cents Limitless takes 0.30 cents a contract against Polymarket's 0.45.
• Against Polymarket's crypto rate of 0.07 the crossing moves to about 57 cents, which is outside the region where Limitless's flat 3.00% applies at all. So across the whole published flat band — a penny to 50 cents — Limitless is the cheaper venue for a crypto contract, which is exactly the category its listing is dominated by.
• Above the midpoint Polymarket takes it back. At 70 cents the two are within a hundredth of a cent; at 90 cents it is 0.45 against 0.61; at 99 cents it is 0.05 against 0.42, roughly eight times.
• Myriad's common 1% AMM buy is 0.01 × price at every price, which undercuts both order books everywhere below 80 cents — and is, per the section above, the charge least likely to be what the trade actually costs you. It is not even the lowest number here: Limitless's own AMM markets are a flat 0.40% of the fill, 0.2% of the payout at the midpoint, less than half of Myriad's.

The category effect is worth one more line, because it is the largest single number here. Polymarket charges nothing on geopolitical markets and 0.04 on politics and finance, or 1.00% of the payout at the midpoint against Limitless's 1.50%. A reader who trades politics and a reader who trades short-cadence crypto should come to opposite conclusions from the same two schedules.

What you are actually holding

The settlement asset is a third axis and only one of the three cards has anything complicated to say about it.

Polymarket settles in pUSD on Polygon. Limitless settles in USDC on Base. Myriad settles in whatever that market was denominated in: USD1 or USDT on BNB Smart Chain, USDC.e on Abstract, USDC on Linea — and PTS, a season points token rather than a stablecoin, on Celo and Abstract. Of the 70 open markets its API returned on 19 September 2026, 31 were PTS. Nearly half the listing does not pay in money, the interface does not distinguish them, and the fee is zero on all of them, which is one reason the headline fee looks low. Check the token on the market before you take a position.

None of the three runs an identity check in the ordinary flow — an account is a connected or embedded wallet on all three. What differs is when the check arrives. Polymarket has a click-through attestation at signup plus a reactive path used when an account is flagged: an ID and a proof of address in a non-restricted jurisdiction, within 14 days. Limitless and Myriad reserve the right to demand proof of age, identity or eligibility at any time and to suspend an account until it is produced. On all three, the absence of KYC is a default rather than a promise.

Where you are standing may decide this for you

All three bar US traders, which is why they are on this page together rather than on the US one. What is less obvious is that for a large part of the rest of the world, this is not a three-way choice at all.

Polymarket restricts by physical location rather than residency — its help page says so directly, so a resident abroad is judged by where they are standing and a traveller from a restricted country is not. Its list runs to 39 countries plus the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, and the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Fully blocked includes the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Brazil. Singapore, Poland, Thailand and Taiwan are close-only. Germany appears on the card under two different statuses, fully blocked and hold-to-resolution, which is a reason to read the help centre on the day rather than to trust any summary — including this one. Polymarket's own two current documents also disagree with each other, and the Terms delegate the authoritative list to a URL that no longer resolves.

Limitless bars trading from the United States, the "Republic of China" and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Alberta, and bars access entirely from Russia, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The operator is Street Chow Inc., a Panamanian company, under terms dated 15 September 2026.

Myriad bars a longer and less predictable list: the United States, France, Malta, Singapore, Switzerland, Ontario, and the Cayman Islands where its own operator is registered, among others, under terms last updated 13 January 2026.

Put those together and the practical result is stark. A reader in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand or Japan has no access to Polymarket and is choosing between Limitless and Myriad. A reader in France, Malta or Switzerland loses Myriad too and has one option on this page. A reader in Ontario has none of the three. Why a venue is unavailable where you are explains what each of those restrictions actually consists of, because they are four different mechanisms wearing one word.

Which to take, and when to switch

Start with the jurisdiction, not the fee. Work out which of the three is open where you are standing before reading anything above it. For much of western Europe and the Commonwealth the question answers itself.

Take Polymarket where it is open to you, for anything you might need to contest. It is the only venue here where a resolution can be disputed by a defined process rather than by asking nicely — a bond, a two-hour window, and a vote the company cannot overturn — and the only one where an entire category trades fee-free. Switch away from it for contracts you intend to buy below 40 cents, where its coefficient costs more than Limitless's flat 3.00% of a smaller number.

Take Limitless for short-cadence crypto and for cheap contracts. Pyth and Chainlink TWAP resolve the majority of its listing with no human in the loop, which is the cleanest resolution on this page, and on a buy anywhere from a penny to 50 cents its fee is below Polymarket's on every crypto market and below it up to 40 cents on everything else. Two conditions to leave on: the moment the market you want is one the team resolves by hand — sports, politics, anything custom — because the refund policy returns your cost basis and lets the wrong side keep the payout; and Packs, which carry a 10% vig baked into the displayed multiplier where it reads as absent rather than as included.

Take Myriad last, and only after you have quoted your own order. Its published fee undercuts both order books below 80 cents, and it is the one venue on the page where the published fee is not the main cost: an AMM prices your size, and its own card found volume three orders of magnitude apart between one open market and the featured ones. Before anything else, check the settlement token, because nearly half the open listing pays in season points; then treat the fee as a per-market number between 0% and 2% rather than a schedule. It is the right choice when the specific market you want is one of its deep ones and exists nowhere else, and the wrong one as a default.

If none of the three is open where you are and you are a US resident, the choice is a different one entirely — Kalshi vs Polymarket US vs Robinhood, on the venues listing.