PolyForwards

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  Meet the team!

Inspiration

We’ve all used Polymarket long enough to feel the same pain: sometimes the most interesting part of a market happens before the market even goes live. There was no way to lock in a view early, hedge news, or trade around time the way real markets do.

So we asked a simple question: What if Polymarket had forwards the same way tradfi has forwards? That question turned into PolyForwards.

What it does

PolyForwards lets anyone lock in a price today for where a Polymarket event will trade in the future. Users get a clean way to hedge or express early conviction, and market makers get a new surface to quote. A built-in pAMM keeps the system balanced by adjusting premiums as long and short interest shifts. It feels simple on the front end, but under the hood it creates a real forward market on top of PM.

How we built it

We pull live market data from the Polymarket API. Our backend pushes key values into our smart contract, which uses a pAMM to set forward prices. Users can take either side of a forward, and the contract handles settlement based on Polymarket’s outcome. We kept the design small and clear so anyone can run their own pAMM if they want to make markets themselves.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to bring time into a market that normally only handles yes/no bets. We had to design a premium model that feels fair, reacts to imbalance, and doesn’t overwhelm users. Building a system that depends on clean data also forced us to think hard about how we read and store prices. We spent a lot of time making sure the pAMM logic was predictable and didn’t create weird edge cases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We took a simple idea and turned it into a working forward engine with real contracts and a real pricing model. We built something that extends Polymarket without changing how Polymarket works. Seeing our pAMM actually shift premiums as traders enter positions was the moment it all clicked. It felt like we unlocked a missing piece of market structure.

It's live now on devnet, we've attached the link to the explorer with the contract. (https://explorer.solana.com/address/BwMMU9rwkXmLdTL5VLBRwkinri2wW1J6pnwTsVv8PvY9/idl?cluster=devnet)

What we learned

We learned how much of a prediction market’s strength comes from clean design. We also learned that traders want tools they already know from other markets, but built for crypto. Most of all, we learned how to take something complicated and turn it into a simple, usable product.

What's next for PolyForwards

We want to add curves, spreads, and volatility trades so users can build full strategies on PM. We want market makers to compete by spinning up their own pAMMs and quoting their own forward lines. And long term, we want this to be the base layer for a full derivatives system on Polymarket- not just forwards, but the whole stack.

Built With

• rust
• typescript