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Perps vs prediction markets

Published 11 August 2026

You opened Polymarket to bet on an election and there is now a tab full of bitcoin charts and a number called funding. Nothing has been taken away: the prediction markets are where they were. Polymarket Perps is a second instrument sitting beside them, and it behaves nothing like the one you already know.

Short answer

A prediction market asks “will X happen?” Each share settles at $1 or $0 when the event resolves, holding costs nothing, and the worst case is that your shares are worth zero.

A perp asks “which way is this going?” and never stops asking. There is no expiry and no resolution — the position is marked to a live price, funding is charged every 1 hour you hold it, and with leverage it can be closed against your will at a price you did not choose.

They are separate products with separate order books, separate fee schedules and separate referral programs. Perps is open and needs no code; prediction markets do not.

Two different questions

A prediction market is a question with an answer. “Will this happen by this date?” Somebody eventually reads the world, decides, and every share becomes worth exactly $1 or exactly $0. The price in between is the market’s estimate of the probability, and the contract has a finish line built into it.

A perpetual future is a question with no answer. It tracks the price of something — a stock, a coin, an ounce of gold — and never settles.source There is no date, no resolver and no $1. Your position is worth whatever the tracked price says it is worth this second, and it stays open until you close it or the exchange closes it for you.

One instrument ends. The other one only ever pauses when you make it.

Polymarket Perps vs prediction markets, in one table

Every row is a place where the mental model you built on prediction markets will actively mislead you on Perps.

	Prediction market	Perp
The question	Will X happen?	Which way is this price going?
What you own	Yes or No shares in an outcome	Long or short exposure to a price
How it ends	Resolution, on a date, to $1 or $0	It doesn’t. You close it, or it closes you
Valuation while open	Whatever somebody will pay for the share	Marked to a live mark price, continuously
Cost of holding	Nothing	Funding, every hour, either direction
Leverage	None	Up to 20x
Forced exit	Never	Liquidation, then auto-deleveraging
Worst case	Shares resolve to zero	Margin gone, plus a liquidation fee on the way out
Trading fee	Charged on the prediction market schedule	From 0.0400% taker, per fill, on notional
What’s listed	Events: elections, policy, sport, culture	39 prices: 24 stocks, 9 crypto, 3 commodities, 3 indices
Access	Open, subject to jurisdiction	open, no code required
Referral program	Its own code, tracked separately	Its own code, 20% of referred trading fees

Perps figures are Polymarket's documented rules.

Resolution vs mark-to-market

On a prediction market, being right is a single event that happens once, at the end. Your shares may wobble at 40c for months while you are correct the whole time, and none of that wobble does anything to you. When resolution arrives, the shares are worth $1. The path did not matter.

On a perp, the path is the whole thing. Polymarket computes a mark price for every market roughly five times a second and uses it for your unrealised PnL, your margin check and your liquidation trigger.source There is no “eventually”. There is only now, recomputed continuously, and if now goes badly enough your position does not survive to see the part where you were right.

The number on the chart is not the number that matters. The last trade price is what printed on the local book; mark is a median of three independently-built candidates, and mark is what liquidates you. The difference between mark and index.

What it costs to hold each one

A prediction market position costs nothing to hold. You buy the shares, you wait, the position sits there. Time is free. A perp charges rent, every hour, for the privilege of still being in the trade.source

A normal future converges on spot because it has to settle on a date. A perpetual has no date, so longs pay shorts when the contract is rich and shorts pay longs when it is cheap. That transfer is the tether. Polymarket settles it every 1 hour; most venues settle every eight.source

F_8h  = scale × (mean_P + clamp(0.0001 − mean_P, ±0.0005))
FR_1h = clamp(F_8h / 8, ±0.04)

scale is 1.0 on crypto markets and 0.5 everywhere else.

Two consequences follow, and both bite beginners. First, a long that goes exactly sideways for a month loses money. Second, funding does not pause when the underlying market is shut — a stock perp keeps charging over the weekend, when the thing it tracks has not traded since Friday.source The funding formula in full, and what every market is paying.

Zero vs liquidation

Both instruments can take all of the money you committed. They take it in profoundly different ways.

A prediction market position goes to zero by resolving against you. It is an event you can see coming, it happens once, and until it happens the shares are still yours. Nothing intervenes. Nobody closes anything.

A leveraged perp position is closed for you. When equity falls below maintenance margin the system starts issuing reduce-only, immediate-or-cancel, market-priced orders with no protective spread — they sweep whatever is resting on the book at the moment they land.source And it costs extra: while an account is flagged, every fill carries a liquidation fee on top of the normal maker or taker rate.source

There is one more mechanism with no prediction-market analogue at all. If a liquidation is severe enough that the book cannot absorb it, Polymarket can force-close the position against the most profitable, most leveraged traders on the other side. That is auto-deleveraging, and it can shrink a position of yours that is doing perfectly well.source The calculator shows exactly where your line sits.

The same belief, expressed both ways

Three beliefs somebody might genuinely hold, each written out as a prediction market trade and as a perp trade.

“Bitcoin is going up over the next few months”

As a prediction market — you buy Yes on a market like “bitcoin above $X on date D”. You need two things to be true: the direction, and the threshold being cleared on that specific day. A 40% rise that arrives a week after D pays you $0.
As a perp — you go long. You capture the move itself, whatever size it is and whenever it arrives, and you keep the position open as long as you want to. You pay funding hourly for the privilege, and with leverage you can be stopped out by a drawdown on the way to being right.
Honest answer — the perp, clearly. A directional view without a date is exactly what a perp is for, and forcing it into a threshold-and-date contract adds two ways to lose that you did not intend to take on. Size it so the drawdown you expect is survivable.

“Nvidia’s next earnings will beat”

As a prediction market — you buy Yes on the beat itself. The event is discrete, dated and resolvable. You are paid for the thing you actually have an opinion about, and the stock’s reaction is irrelevant to your payout.
As a perp — you go long NVDA into the print. Now you are exposed to something subtly different: not whether the numbers beat, but whether the price goes up. Those come apart constantly, and holding through the event means holding through the gap.
Honest answer — the prediction market, if your view really is about the numbers. Take the perp only if your view is about the price reaction, which is a different and harder call.

“The Fed cuts at the next meeting”

As a prediction market — a single Yes share. Dated, discrete, resolvable, and priced as a probability you can argue with directly.
As a perp — you can’t. Perps list prices, not policy outcomes: the 39 instruments are stocks, crypto, commodities and indices.source The nearest expression is a proxy trade — long gold, say — which is a bet on the cut and on the proxy behaving, plus funding while you wait.
Honest answer — the prediction market, and it is not close. A contract on the event beats a leveraged bet on something correlated with it.

If your belief has a date and a defined outcome, the prediction market is the honest instrument. If your belief is directional and open-ended, the perp is. The full list of what Perps lists — no amount of wanting will make an election appear on it.

Which one you actually want

The questions worth asking before you click anything.

If this is true of your view…	…use
It has a specific date attached	Prediction market
The outcome is yes-or-no, not more-or-less	Prediction market
You want to hold for months and forget about it	Prediction market — a perp bills you the whole time
You want a known, capped downside and no forced exit	Prediction market
You think a price goes up or down, with no deadline	Perp
You want the size of the move, not just its direction	Perp
You want to be short something	Perp — or the No side, if the event exists
You want exposure larger than your balance	Perp, and read the liquidation page first

One thing that is not on that list: which is cheaper. It depends entirely on how long you hold. A 20x round trip at the bottom fee tier costs 0.0800% of notional, which is 1.6% of the margin you posted — and that is before a single hour of funding. The fee page has the calculator.

Two products, two referral programs

They share a brand and a login and nothing else. Perps runs its own order book, its own margin engine, its own collateral asset, and its own referral program with its own codes and its own tracking.source

A Perps code and a prediction-market code are not interchangeable. Volume on one does not count towards the other.
On Perps, the referral code is just a referral code now — it used to be the one that got somebody through the open door.
The referrer receives 20% of the trading fees their referred traders pay, settled weekly. There is no separate bonus for the person being invited — anybody telling you otherwise is guessing.
A code applies to an account exactly once. You cannot switch later and you cannot refer yourself.

What a Perps code does and does not get you, in detail — and separately, the part no code fixes: Polymarket does not permit Perps order placement from United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk or Luhansk. Reading market data is unrestricted; placing an order is not.source

If the perp is the right instrument for what you believe, read how Perps works, then the walkthrough of a first trade. If the prediction market was already the right instrument, that is the cheaper answer anyway.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between Polymarket Perps and Polymarket prediction markets?

A prediction market asks whether a specific event will happen and settles each share at $1 or $0 when it resolves. A perpetual future asks which way a price is going, has no expiry and no resolution, and is marked to a live price continuously. You can hold a prediction market position for free until it resolves; a perp charges funding every hour you hold it and can be liquidated.

Do I need a separate account for Polymarket Perps?

You do not need a separate Polymarket login, and you no longer need an invite code — Perps opened to the public. It is still a separate product. Perps trades against pUSD collateral on its own exchange, with its own order book, its own fee schedule and its own referral program.

Can I lose more than I put in on a Polymarket perp?

The margin you posted is what is at risk, and liquidation is designed to close the position before equity goes negative. But losing all of it is far easier than on a prediction market: on a 20x market with a 2.5% maintenance margin rate, a 2.56% adverse move in the underlying is enough to trigger liquidation, and every fill made while your account is flagged carries an extra liquidation fee on top of the normal taker rate.

Does a prediction market position cost anything to hold?

No. Once you own Yes or No shares, holding them to resolution costs nothing — no daily charge, no carry. A perp is the opposite: funding settles every 1 hour, and with zero premium the fixed interest leg still charges longs +0.0013% an hour on a crypto market, which is 10.95% a year before any premium at all.

Which is better for betting on an election or a Fed decision?

A prediction market, almost always. Those are discrete events with a date and a defined outcome — what a $1/$0 contract is built for. Perps do not list election or policy outcomes — the 39 Perps instruments are stocks, crypto, commodities and indices, all of them prices rather than events.

Which is better for a view on the price of bitcoin?

Usually a perp, if you have a directional view without a specific date attached. A perp tracks the price continuously, so you capture the move you were right about rather than needing the price to be above a threshold on one particular day. A prediction market only pays if your threshold and your date both land.

Do Perps and prediction market referral codes work the same way?

No. They are separate programs with separate codes and separate tracking. The Perps program pays the referrer 20% of the trading fees their referred traders pay, settled weekly, and a code can be applied to an account exactly once and cannot be switched later.

Can I trade Polymarket Perps from the United States?

No. Polymarket does not permit Perps order placement from United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk or Luhansk. Reading market data from those jurisdictions is unrestricted; placing orders is not.

Sources · checked 11 August 2026