Original title: (Adding oracles, Polymarket's ambitions exposed)

Original author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

On the evening of April 2, the leading prediction market Polymarket officially announced the integration of oracle services from Pyth Network, which will become the settlement data source for a new batch of traditional asset-related prediction events launched by Polymarket.

According to statements from Polymarket and Pyth Network, this batch of events will initially cover commodities such as gold, silver, WTI crude oil, and natural gas, as well as more than a dozen US stocks including Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, Coinbase, and Palantir, along with major stock indices and some exchange-traded funds (ETFs) — for example, "Will gold rise or fall in this hour?" and "Will silver be above or below the target price by a certain point in time?"

Pyth Network will provide real-time price data via WebSocket, and Polymarket will sample this data every second and publish it as real-time charts, allowing traders to continuously see the market's position relative to their own positions.

Polymarket product head Mustafa Aljadery stated: 'Millions of dollars in prediction results can often hinge on a single price point, so the absolute accuracy of data sources must be guaranteed. Pyth Network provides this guarantee, allowing Polymarket to further expand into high-risk financial markets.'

Polymarket's path of oracle expansion

This is not Polymarket's extension of oracle services.

Polymarket initially relied primarily on UMA's Optimistic Oracle mechanism. The logic of UMA is essentially a 'social consensus oracle'—proposers submit results, challengers initiate disputes, and voters ultimately decide. This mechanism is very well-suited for unstructured events with strong subjectivity and no single standard answer, such as political elections, policy changes, and social hot topics.

However, subjective judgment often also means space for disputes. Historically, Polymarket has repeatedly sparked discussions within the community about manipulation risks and fairness due to settlement disputes with UMA.

In September 2025, when Polymarket began to prominently promote cryptocurrency rise and fall events, it urgently needed to introduce a more certain data source to reduce the possibility of human intervention. To this end, Polymarket chose to cooperate with Chainlink, using a combination of Chainlink Data Streams (responsible for providing low-latency, timestamped market prices) and Chainlink Automation (responsible for executing on-chain result settlements at preset times), allowing the cryptocurrency rise and fall event markets for BTC, ETH, etc., on Polymarket to be automatically and quickly settled, while allowing users to view related assets' low-latency, verifiable prices in real-time.

In a sense, integrating with Chainlink marks Polymarket's first extension from 'social consensus prediction' to 'automated price judgment', but Polymarket's goals are clearly not limited to the cryptocurrency market.

Compared to Chainlink, Pyth Network is characterized by its data being provided directly by trading firms, trading platforms, market makers, and banks from around the world. These institutions actively participate in pricing in the global market, while Pyth Pro will obtain data from the highest quality data publishers in the network, including Jump Trading, Blue Ocean, LMAX, and Jane Street, among others. Perhaps considering its global market characteristics, Polymarket ultimately chose Pyth Network as the data source for traditional financial assets.

Polymarket's ambition glimpsed

With the cooperation with Pyth Network finalized, Polymarket has formed a clear multi-layered oracle architecture:

· UMA: Non-standard event layer, responsible for politics, society, breaking news, macro events;

· Chainlink: Crypto asset layer, responsible for feeding prices of on-chain assets such as BTC, ETH, and automated price settlements;

· Pyth Network: Traditional finance layer, providing high-frequency prices for US stocks, commodities, indices, and other traditional assets from institutions.

From representing non-standard events with UMA, to focusing on crypto-native markets with Chainlink, and now concentrating on global financial markets with Pyth Network, every time Polymarket introduces a new oracle service, it pushes the platform towards a broader market. The expansion of oracles is essentially the expansion of 'tradable futures'—the more data sources there are, the more dimensions of the real world can be brought into the betting scope.

If this logic continues to develop, the markets that Polymarket could incorporate in the future are virtually limitless. Macroeconomic data, corporate earnings reports, sports events, weather changes, and even AI model releases could all be accessed through different oracles. As long as there are verifiable data sources, corresponding markets can be constructed. The uncertainties of the real world will be continuously broken down into bettable events.

From this perspective, Polymarket's ultimate goal may be far beyond a simple prediction market, but rather a 'future trading platform' that covers all uncertainties. When various uncertain events can all be unified under the same mechanism, everything can be bet on, and everything can be priced. The oracle is merely a technical extension, but what it points to is a one-stop super platform that is taking shape and far exceeds everyone's estimates.

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