Polymarket Market Creation Explained

The venue's own team and accepted partners propose questions, and they land as binary contracts with a fixed resolution (the same structure the archive indexes). This is why a Polymarket series is legible: slug, clock, and outcome are standardized across hundreds of thousands of markets.

User-driven creation sits alongside in some snapshots, but the recorded and ranking-relevant inventory is the curated, resolved-orderly set — 118,251 resolved markets in the archive's crypto share alone.

A created market states a deadline and an event: "Will X happen by Y?" The contract resolves to 1 or 0 at a defined second, and in the crypto family that second is tied to a reference price — the mechanism behind the 5m/15m/4h windows.

The archive's row schema mirrors the creation format: market id, slug, series, question text, resolution time, and outcome, so "who created what" is partially recoverable from the record's metadata.

Creation metadata (series, tags) is what makes discovery work — the /v1/series and /v1/tags endpoints on the official API and the archive's own series fields are the same identifiers, so a market's family is queryable from open to resolution.

The honest note: series registration precedes liquidity, and the archive shows the full arc — created-but-thin markets included — which is exactly right for studying which creations ever became tradable.

Creation is curation, and the honest claim is bounded: the archive indexes what the venue registered and traded, and creation experiments that never attracted a book are visible in the data as thin, unresolved zero-volume frames.

• Up/Down markets
• Resolved markets
• Current prices