What Is a Polymarket Up or Down Market?

How the market works

Each window is its own market. Two outcome tokens trade against each other — UP and DOWN — and their prices sit between 0 and 1, readable as the market's implied probability that the window closes up. A price of 0.62 on UP means the book is paying 62 cents for a contract that settles at $1 if the close matches or beats the open. The winning side settles at 1, the losing side at 0. Whether those implied probabilities have matched what actually happened is measured across thousands of resolved windows in the calibration record.

Windows are consecutive and non-overlapping. A 15-minute market opens on each quarter hour and the next one starts the moment it ends, so there is always a live market per asset per timeframe. Internally each window is identified by its epoch: the Unix second at which it opened, floored to the window length.

Exactly how resolution works

Resolution is mechanical and price-based. Two numbers decide it:

• Open — the settlement price at the start of the window. This is the price to beat.
• Close — the settlement price at the end of the window.

The settlement source depends on the timeframe, per Polymarket's market rules:

• 5m, 15m, 4h — Chainlink's 60-second TWAP (time-weighted average price) data stream for the pair, e.g. BTC/USD, since 2026-08-07. 5-minute windows used a 30-second TWAP until 2026-08-14; before 2026-08-07 all three settled on the plain Chainlink stream.
• 1h — the Binance 1-hour candle for the USDT pair, e.g. BTC/USDT: its close against its open. HYPE uses the Binance Futures HYPEUSDT contract rather than spot.

If close is greater than or equal to open, the market resolves UP, so an exact tie resolves UP. Only a close below the open resolves DOWN. There is no push, no refund, and no discretion: a flat window is an UP window.

The outcome UpDown Charts records for each window is the result Polymarket settled, read from its Gamma market API. Until Polymarket settles, a provisional outcome is computed from the published open and close by the same rule.

Nothing about the order book affects the result. The UP token can trade at 0.90 for the whole window and still settle at 0 if the close comes in one tick below the open.

What "price to beat" means

Price to beat (PTB) is the open price — the level the close has to match or beat. It is fixed once the window starts and never changes afterwards, which makes it the single reference point for the entire window. Everything a trader cares about mid-window reduces to one question: is the current price above or below the price to beat, and how far.

Polymarket publishes the value through its own endpoint, but that value can appear late, so two series are recorded separately. ptbCaptured is our own first Chainlink tick after the window opens (for HYPE only from 2026-09-24, when its Chainlink series was added). ptbApi is Polymarket's reported open price. On 1h windows (and 5m, 15m and 4h windows before 2026-08-07) it is the number settlement compares; since 2026-08-07 5m, 15m and 4h settle on a Chainlink TWAP, so it is the closest published reference and the recorded outcome is Polymarket's settled result. Early in a window the captured value fills the gap until the API value arrives; where they disagree, ptbApi is the one to trust.

The 28 markets

Seven assets, four timeframes each. Every row links to its live chart and epoch history — or browse all markets in one place:

Window lengths: 5m = 300 seconds, 15m = 900 seconds, 1h = 3,600 seconds, 4h = 14,400 seconds. A 5-minute market produces 288 windows a day per asset; a 4-hour market produces 6.

Where UpDown Charts fits

Polymarket shows you the current book. It does not show you what the underlying price was doing tick by tick against the price to beat, and it does not keep the history in a form you can query.

UpDown Charts records all 28 markets continuously from five pooled sources — Binance, Pyth Hermes (no data since 2026-08-26), Chainlink, the Polymarket CLOB order book, and the price-to-beat endpoint — at tick level, and keeps 90 days of history. Every epoch carries its open, close, outcome and final volume. You can chart it, export CSV, stream it over WebSocket, or pull it through the REST API and MCP server.

Free accounts see BTC 15m for the live window only. Pro opens all 28 markets with full history, CSV and WebSocket. Premium adds API and MCP access. See pricing or create an account.

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