Building the World’s Largest Prediction Market: Polymarket at $15.5B+

In the high-stakes world of onchain prediction markets, uptime, speed, and scale aren’t luxuries—they’re lifelines. For Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, that means leveraging infrastructure that grows with them, from a promising new app in 2020 to a global platform processing over $15.5 billion in total volume today.

Since day one, we has been that partner.

Partnering with Alchemy From the StartScaling Together Since Day One

When Polymarket launched in 2020, they quickly realized the overhead of managing in-house infrastructure would slow them down. Early attempts to self-manage nodes proved costly, unreliable, and distracting for their engineering team. They needed a provider that could handle spikes in traffic, deliver reliable transaction performance, and offer the kind of hands-on support critical for a real-time betting product.

After evaluating multiple RPC providers, they chose Alchemy for one primary reason: performance under pressure.

“We didn’t want our engineers waking up at 3am to reboot a node. With Alchemy, we never had to. That let us focus all our energy on building the best product.”

Fast forward to the 2024 U.S. Presidential debates, which drew over 67 million television viewers and became the most-watched non-sports TV event of the year, Polymarket handled over 125,000 concurrent users on their site. $3.3 Billion in bets were handled seamlessly though the election period, at one point peaking at 20% of total transaction on the Polygon network, all securely handled by Alchemy**.** We scaled with traffic and supported the moment with a suite of custom technical interventions:

• Tuned transaction broadcasters to increase propagation and reduce time-to-mine

• Deployed fast network routes from Polymarket’s servers to Alchemy’s infra

• Dynamically rerouted requests based on p99 latency to boost performance

• Monitored customized alerts and maintained a dedicated war room critical events

• Spun up 2 additional dedicated node fleets to ensure top tier performance for both reads and writes

Redefining What’s Possible, Powered by Cortex

While Polymarket was scaling their business, our team completely rebuilt our infrastructure from the ground up to elevate our customers to the next level. Over the past few months, we’ve quietly rolled out our largest upgrade to date across our entire customer base, rigorously validating it under production workloads. The engine driving this transformation is Cortex.

Already powering our full developer platform and some of the biggest names in web3, Cortex delivers super-fast performance with sub-50 ms latency, seamlessly scaling to over 1 million requests per second across Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America — all while maintaining 99.99% reliability. With Cortex, our customers aren’t just ready for the future of web3; they’re already running on it.

The impact was immediate and widespread for Polymarket:

• Latency for critical ingestion workflows sped up 2.5x from ~250ms to ~100ms

• Snappier UX for their users across the globe

• 99.99% reliability across regions

“Working with Alchemy has been nothing short of essential,” said Rodrigo, Polymarket’s Head of Platform. “The personal support, the quick turnaround on our feature asks, and the attention to our scale—Alchemy consistently goes above and beyond. They’re not just an infra provider. They’re part of our team.”

One Provider, Infinite Scale

Having a single infrastructure partner has been a force multiplier for Polymarket—speeding up debugging via our dashboard debugging, aligning scaling plans, and allowing their team to move faster without infrastructure distractions.

Looking Ahead

With tens of billions in cumulative volume and exponential user growth, Polymarket is just getting started. Their focus: frictionless UX, international expansion, and pushing the frontier of what prediction markets can be.