Eight API Design Patterns from Polymarket's Prediction Market Architecture
Polymarket, currently the world's largest prediction market platform by volume, structures its API across three distinct domains: Gamma for market discovery, CLOB for order book and trading, and a Data API for analytics and historical records. Each domain is designed with its own latency requirements, caching policies, rate limits, and authentication rules, allowing each to scale independently. Market data such as prices, order books, and event metadata is publicly accessible without API keys, reducing friction for developers, analysts, and third-party integrations. Write operations like placing or cancelling orders require authentication, using a two-step process that combines EIP-712 wallet signatures with HMAC-SHA256 request signing. The architecture offers practical lessons for API designers, including separating surfaces by business function rather than database entities and reserving strong authentication only for state-changing actions.
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