Polymarket Up or Down Markets, Explained

Each contract is a Yes/No question pinned to a window — BTC Up or Down, 2:15–2:20PM ET — where the outcome depends on the asset price at expiry. Timeframes repeat: 5-minute, 15-minute, and 4-hour are the core cadence, joined by price thresholds and event-linked markets.

In the crypto portion of this archive, Up/Down contracts are about 62% of rows, price thresholds about 17%, and event-linked markets about 14%. The four anchor assets are BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP.

Five-minute markets resolve on the reference price at expiry. The recorded books show the final minute converging: winning side bidding at 0.99, losing side fading, top-of-book size surging from ~4,600 to over 67,000 shares in one measured BTC contract before its 0.99/0.01 resolution.

That is the intra-window dynamic a 1-minute grid or a bare price feed cannot show — the trade happens inside the window's final seconds, which is why recorded 250ms books are the standard for studying them.

• Directional signals alone are weak: the market prices in the drift seconds after open.
• Depth divergence — resting size leaving or inverting before price moves — is the measurable edge (26-second repricing events, BTC lag of 37 minutes).
• Settlement dynamics reward who holds the winning side near 0.99, not who bought it cheapest.
• Cross-market checks against Binance spot have documented Polymarket printing its low in the same second as the exchange.

• Pull a 5-minute Up/Down contract at 250ms and identify the strike ladder levels present; Up/Down ladders map the coin's bound to a cents-wide price band, and the ladder records the executable floor.
• Count the one-sided frames for the contract; the measured Up/Down families sit at 90%+ one-sidedness, and your contract should reproduce the texture.
• Extract the high and low encasing the contract (the bound encasing) and mark the second the ladder compressed toward resolution.
• Add the contract to a small series table (slug, bounds, first reprice second, last reprice second) — the Up/Down anatomy across one day.

Up/Down is a bounded-price instrument: the coin moves inside its bound, the ladder prices the market's answer, and the measured behavior — one-sidedness, round-grid frames at 0.99/0.995, median trades of 42,254 — is the texture of the most popular product on the venue.

The measured contrasts among the four anchors are part of the anatomy: BTC repriced its lower bound in 37 minutes on the August 23 event while ETH, BNB, DOGE, and SOL collapsed in 26 seconds — the same product, four measured speeds.

The practical reading order for any Up/Down contract is fixed: state the bound, label the side, read the floor. Those three facts come from one 250ms frame, and the archive serves thousands per contract, which is why entire reprice studies fit in a single pull.

Understanding Up/Down is understanding the ladder between the bounds, and the archive records the whole mechanism at 250ms.

The one-sided share and the round-grid rate are the two numbers that describe a Up/Down market's liquidity far better than any mid chart.

Study Up/Down as a family: reprice seconds and depth swings per coin are the columns, and the frames are the evidence.

Up/Down is the x-axis of the whole catalog: the BTC/ETH/SOL/XRP pages, the settlement corpus, and the reprise studies all assume this page's bound-plus-ladder model.

Read it with the price-bounds and price-level explainers to go from product to mechanism.

Most measured facts on the site — one-sidedness, round-grid bunching, the 26-second family collapse — happen inside this product first.

Up/Down is the bounded-price ladder where most of the measured catalog happens.

Start any Up/Down reading from the bound, the one-sided share, and the round-grid rate; the ladder between the bounds is the instrument.

• Order book data
• Price history
• Crypto data
• Provider matrix