Polymarket gave sports traders roughly three hours' notice before raising a key fee rate by almost 70%, a late-night change that came in the same message telling users the platform was trying to cut trading costs.
- In a Discord channel, Suhail Kakar, head of DeFi integrations at Polymarket, said taker rebates and level-up bonuses had been backfilled for eligible traders.
- He also said the prediction-market platform had begun rolling out 0.25-cent ticks to "tighten spreads and bring down what it actually costs you to trade."
Then Kakar noted that the sports fee coefficient would move to 0.05 starting Friday at 12:01 am ET, bringing sports in line with Polymarket's other categories.
- The post was timestamped 9:09 pm ET, giving sports traders about three hours before the new rate took effect.
The move technically increased Polymarket's sports taker fee coefficient to 0.05 from 0.03, while cutting the maker rebate from 25% to 15%, according to a comparison of the archived and new fee tables.
Polymarket's current documentation now lists sports markets with a 0.05 taker fee rate, no maker fee and a 15% maker rebate.
The platform says taker fees are calculated at match time using a formula based on the number of shares traded, the fee rate and the price of the shares, with the fee peaking around 50-cent markets.
- That means the sports fee increase matters most in the markets that look closest to a toss-up.
- For a 100-share sports trade at 50 cents, Polymarket's current fee table shows a $1.25 taker fee.
- Under the old 0.03 coefficient, the same formula would imply a 75-cent fee.
Polymarket says the fees fund its maker rebate program, which pays daily rebates to liquidity providers to encourage deeper liquidity and tighter spreads.