# poly-maker Open-source maker-only quoting bot for Polymarket political markets, rebuilt for V2. *https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/poly-maker · Trading Clients, SDKs & Bots* ## Facts ### At a glance | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | Vendor | warproxxx | | Category | Trading Clients, SDKs & Bots | | Job | automation | | Website | https://github.com/warproxxx/poly-maker | | Pricing model | open-source | | Free tier | true | | Open source | true | | Licence | MIT | | Self-hosted | true | | Tested hands-on | false | | Last updated | 2026-10-01 | ### Availability | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | Jurisdictions | asia, latam | | Open to US persons | false | | KYC required | false | ### Markets | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | Subjects | politics | | Settlement | crypto | | Resolved by | none | ### Economics | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | Taker fee | none | | Maker fee | none | | Liquidity model | clob | | Platforms | cli | | AI features | none | ### Interfaces | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | API | false | | WebSocket | false | | Scripting | none | | Python | true | | MCP server | false | | Export | csv | ### Capabilities Yes: screening, order_book, automation, live_trading, paper_trading, portfolio_tracking, alerts No: charting, backtesting, calibration_scoring, cross_venue, news, tax_reporting *Verified: pricing 2026-09-30; availability 2026-09-30; capabilities 2026-09-30.* ## What it is A market-making bot for the international [Polymarket](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket) order book, published on GitHub by the account warproxxx under the MIT licence, where it had 1,509 stars and 493 forks on 1 October 2026. It is a single async Python process with a command-line interface (`polymaker`): it discovers political markets through the Gamma API, keeps a live order book per outcome token from the market WebSocket, and rests **post-only** quotes on both sides, so it only ever adds liquidity and never crosses the spread by design. The mechanics, as the README lays them out: - **Quotes are two bids.** It computes a fair value from the depth-weighted midpoint and recent trade flow, leans it against current inventory, and posts a bid on YES and a bid on NO whose prices sum to less than one dollar. When both fill, the pair can be merged back into collateral at the difference - an exit that does not need to sell into the book. - **A regime machine per market.** QUIET keeps quotes inside the liquidity-rewards band, TRENDING widens and halves size, EVENT pulls quotes after a sweep or jump, REDUCE_ONLY exits near an inventory cap or an end date, HALTED cancels everything on stale data, resolution or a kill switch. - **Market selection by programme scoring.** `polymaker scan` ranks political markets by the liquidity-reward and maker-rebate programmes' scoring against volatility and spread; you add the ones you want to a TOML trade list. - **Risk caps and a dead-man switch.** Per-market, per-event-group and total exposure caps, a daily-loss kill switch, and Polymarket's exchange heartbeat, which cancels resting orders within about ten seconds if the process dies. State - positions, orders, PnL, the market catalogue - lives in one SQLite file, and raw WebSocket and order events are journalled to disk for later replay. **This is the second poly-maker.** From March 2025 to April 2026 the repository held a different program: parameters read from a Google Sheet, a Node.js helper for merging positions, and `py-clob-client` 0.28.0 underneath. Pull request #32, merged on 5 July 2026, replaced it with the current package, versioned 2.0.0 in `pyproject.toml`. Almost everything written about poly-maker elsewhere, including most of its forks, describes the first one. ## Availability The code installs anywhere Python 3.12 and `uv` do. The venue does not: it trades only on international Polymarket, which bars US persons and a list of other jurisdictions by physical location - the [polymarket](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket) card has the list and how it is enforced. Nothing in the licence restricts the code, but a quoting bot is for placing orders, so the flags above are that venue's reach: what stops a US reader is the account at the other end, and there is no path from this bot to [Polymarket US](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-us). What leaves your machine while it runs: calls to Polymarket's CLOB, Gamma and data APIs, JSON-RPC calls to a public Polygon endpoint (`polygon-bor-rpc.publicnode.com` by default), and, if you configure one, alert posts to your webhook. ## Pricing Free and MIT-licensed; there is nothing to buy. Running it costs what the trading costs: resting fills pay no Polymarket fee, and any exit taken with a marketable order pays the taker fee - see [what a trade actually costs](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/what-a-trade-actually-costs). The `moneydoctor` self-test deliberately buys and sells a small amount with real money, a few cents by the README's estimate. The operator notes in `TIPS.md` leave one number open that you should not. They give the taker fee as `rate × p(1-p)` per share with a rate of 0.04, say the client library treats that as "4% (≈2–3% of notional)", and warn that if the UI shows 0.4% instead, every rebate estimate is ten times too high. The schedule on the [polymarket](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket) card settles it on the 4% reading: 0.04 × 0.5 × 0.5 is one cent a contract at 50 cents, which is 2% of a 50-cent stake and 1% of the dollar the contract pays out. The 0.4% reading would be a tenth of that. ## Markets & resolution The bot resolves nothing. Markets end through the UMA [optimistic oracle](https://predictionmarkets.tools/glossary/optimistic-oracle), and the bot's REDUCE_ONLY and HALTED states are how it stops quoting around an end date or a resolution rather than anything that protects inventory already held. Inventory you still own at resolution is a directional position in whatever the oracle decides. Scope is **political markets**: the scanner filters Gamma by the `politics` tag. Neg-risk event groups - several mutually exclusive outcomes under one event - are handled, with their own worst-case loss cap. ## Integrations Python 3.12, installed with `uv`, on Polymarket's own `py-clob-client-v2` for EIP-712 order signing and the builder relayer client for deposit-wallet operations. The wallet setting defaults to signature type 3, the [deposit wallet](https://predictionmarkets.tools/glossary/deposit-wallet), with types 0 to 2 for older account setups. A `doctor` command preflights the wallet, clock, WebSocket and balances before anything goes live, and `livetest` rests one deep post-only order and cancels it. Alerts go to any webhook that accepts a JSON POST. There is no HTTP API of its own, no MCP server and no second venue. ## Limitations **The author says it can lose money, and has said worse.** The current README carries a warning that market making on Polymarket is competitive and can lose money, calls the bot a reference implementation and a research harness, and says to test in `--paper` mode first. Between 17 January and 5 July 2026 the warning read, in the author's words, "In today's market, this bot is not profitable and will lose money." The README also links a thread on X summarising the author's experience of running the first version; we did not read it. **The operator notes are a record of a loss, and a useful one.** `TIPS.md` is written from one supervised live session on two political markets and gives the result as a loss of about 15.51 dollars in total, most of it from one oversized fill on a thin book. Its ranked failure list - adverse selection on gapped books, orders below the reward minimum size that earn nothing, false regime signals on quiet markets, churn that loses queue position, and a positions endpoint that lags during fast moves - is the most concrete description of what [a bot cannot fix](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/what-a-bot-cannot-fix) that we have seen published by a bot's own author. **The key in `.env` can move the funds.** `PK` signs orders and is the key to the wallet. It sits in a plain file beside the code; [where your key lives](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/where-your-key-lives) is the background on what that exposes. **Quiet since July.** The last commit on `main` is dated 2026-07-09, four days after the rewrite landed; there are no releases or tags. Four issues are open. The newest real bug report, #34 of 24 July 2026, shows that the order-flow half of the TRENDING test can never fire - the flow estimate is bounded to between -1 and 1 and every shipped threshold is above 1 - and it has had no reply. The dependency on `py-clob-client-v2` is pinned at 1.0.2, while Polymarket has since shipped 1.2.0 and points new projects at [polymarket-client](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-client) instead. **Half-finished by its own account.** The README lists what is not built: a replay backtester over the journals, and any external feed such as polls, news or other venues. Merging a YES-and-NO pair back to collateral through a Safe or proxy wallet is not wired, so for most accounts inventory leaves through limit sells. **One venue, one topic.** Political markets on international Polymarket, and nothing else. **Nothing here has been run by us** - not paper mode, not `livetest`, not a fill. ## Alternatives **The forks.** GitHub reported 493 forks on 1 October 2026, and on 30 September 2026 the most-starred of them had one star. The great majority copy the Google Sheets version and describe themselves that way, which puts them on the retired V1 client; `unstatusthequo/polymaker-plus`, which adds opportunity filtering, is one of those. None is a separately maintained product, and none is carded here. Polymarket's own older keeper, `Polymarket/poly-market-maker`, is MIT-licensed and was last pushed to in July 2024, well before V2; it is not carded here either. A narrower tool aimed at the same reward band: [polymarket-lp-tool](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-lp-tool) does not create orders at all, only re-prices the ones you placed by hand to keep them inside the band the rewards programme scores, and is not open source in the legal sense. For a different strategy on the same venue, [polymarket-alpha-bot](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-alpha-bot) looks for covering portfolios across related markets. To build your own, start from [polymarket-client](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-client); [where the liquidity comes from](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/where-liquidity-comes-from) explains what a resting quote is on the other side of, and [why your bot gets throttled](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/why-your-bot-gets-throttled) covers the rate limits a quoting loop runs into first. ## FAQ ### Does poly-maker still work after Polymarket's move to CLOB V2? The current code was rewritten for V2 in July 2026 and its README says it was live-verified end to end, from authentication to posting and cancelling orders. Anything forked from it before 5 July 2026 is the old version, built on the V1 py-clob-client that Polymarket itself now says does not work. ### Does its author claim it is profitable? Its own documents do not claim it. From January to July 2026 the README read - In today's market, this bot is not profitable and will lose money. The current README says market making on Polymarket is competitive and can lose money, and the operator notes record a supervised live session that ended about 15.51 dollars down. ### What credentials does poly-maker need? Two values in a local .env file - PK, the private key of the wallet that signs orders, and BROWSER_ADDRESS, the Polymarket deposit address that holds the pUSD. The key is read by the process on your machine; there is no hosted component. An optional webhook URL sends alerts to Discord, Slack or ntfy. ### Which poly-maker fork should I use? None stands out. The repository reported 493 forks on 1 October 2026, and sorted by stars on 30 September 2026 none had more than one. Most carry the pre-July Google Sheets version, which is built on the retired V1 client. ## Background - [What running a bot does not solve](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/what-a-bot-cannot-fix.md) — A bot fixes speed and consistency. Rate limits, a missing rehearsal, a field that stops arriving, a partial fill and a paused market are not coding problems. - [Why your bot gets throttled, and what the limit is counted against](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/why-your-bot-gets-throttled.md) — Kalshi meters tokens per account tier; Polymarket's order book meters requests per IP and queues the excess. What each counts, and what the libraries assume. - [Where your key lives when software trades for you](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/where-your-key-lives.md) — Four different credentials are all called a key, and they differ in what a copy permits. What the clients in this catalogue ask for, and what to ask them back. ## Also worth comparing - [Kreo](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/kreo.md) — Telegram copy-trading bot for Polymarket whose own fee follows the venue's midpoint curve. - [PolyBot](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polybot.md) — Telegram bot for Polymarket - copy trading and your own Auto Trader rules, from a Safe. - [PolyCop](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polycop.md) — Telegram copy-trading bot for Polymarket that holds your key and charges on every fill. - [Polymarket LP Tool (polymarket_lp_tool)](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-lp-tool.md) — Re-prices your hand-placed Polymarket orders to keep them inside the reward band. - [Alphapoly (polymarket-alpha-bot)](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-alpha-bot.md) — Self-hosted scanner for covering portfolios across correlated Polymarket contracts. - [Betmoar](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/betmoar.md) — A Polymarket terminal and Discord bot, with a dashboard for UMA disputes nobody else has.