World's largest prediction market announces migration from Polygon

Polymarket was built on a smart bet. 

When founder Shayne Coplan launched the platform in 2020 as a 21-year-old NYU dropout, pairing USDC stablecoins with Polygon's Layer-2 infrastructure gave the platform a genuine edge, low fees, fast settlement, and an accessible on-ramp for traders. For years, that combination was good enough.

But Polymarket isn't a scrappy startup anymore. With over $3.3 billion wagered on the 2024 U.S. presidential election alone, and a $9 billion valuation following a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange in October 2025, the platform has long outgrown its original plumbing.

Related: Polygon CEO explains strategy behind $250M acquisition of Coinme, Sequence

A new VP walks in and calls it straight

On April 25, Josh Stevens, just three weeks into his role as VP of Engineering, DeFi, at Polymarket, posted on X,

"The traction Polymarket has seen has massively outpaced our infrastructure," he wrote, "and we haven't done nearly enough to scale to keep up."

Buried among a sweeping list of engineering fixes was the line that caught traders' attention was chain migration. Stevens said that Polymarket needs "more block space, cheaper gas and much smaller block times so settlement is instant." 

However, Stevens didn't mention which chain it is moving to. 

Beyond migration, there are a bunch of other changes coming up. On-chain data latency is being overhauled to make it near-instant. Cancelled transactions, described as "one of the most frustrating issues right now," have a fix incoming. 

The website is also being rebuilt for speed and responsiveness. Along with it observability tooling with proper alerting is being deployed to catch outages themselves rather than hearing about them from market makers first, something Stevens called "unacceptable."

On the infrastructure side, the team is rebuilding its Central Limit Order Book from the ground up, calling it "the most important thing we're doing" and mission-critical to becoming "the best DeFi exchange in the world." 

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What comes next for Polymarket

New hires are already in place. Heads of QA Automation, Dev Tooling, Internal Tooling, and Data Engineering and smaller, dedicated teams built around clearer ownership are already in motion. 

Four security teams are engaged daily to keep funds safe. Moreover, perpetual contracts are incoming, with brand new contracts and a backend built from scratch in Rust.

Stevens has committed to weekly engineering updates starting next Friday. The next few months, as he put it, "are going to speak for themselves."

TheStreet Roundtable has reached out to Polygon for comments and has not received a response at the time of publication.

Related: Polymarket now accepts Solana for wallet deposits