For those who keep talking about using a Polygon RPC for Polymarket arbitrage bots:
Limit orders that you send to the CLOB are off-chain, so in practice you’re just adding an unnecessary hop that increases latency.
And if you’re buying at market price, it still doesn’t really make sense: the CLOB handles the execution flow anyway, and you still spend time signing and getting the settlement transaction submitted on-chain. You still have to send the request to the CLOB, so latency only goes up. It’s better to do it directly. And if you’re buying at market, you’ve already bought you don’t need ultra-high speed just to place a market order afterward.
Want the truth about all these “Polymarket bots”? Here it is: there are no magical servers that execute trades in 5 ms (unless Polymarket themselves gave someone special access). The minimum realistic latency is around 15 ms in eu-west-2, but Polymarket is blocked there, so the closest region is eu-west-1 (according to Polymarket). In my opinion, eu-west-4 makes more sense if you look at network routing the ping is similar, but the infrastructure is better. Ping is usually around 20–25 ms, but real order placement with a full server response is more like 60-70 ms.
Why can’t it be lower?
1.The CLOB has to process your request and place the order. With the amount of traffic, it effectively behaves like a FIFO queue you’re not going to “skip the line” no matter how fast your code is.
2.Cloudflare - yes, Polymarket sits behind CF, and that adds overhead/latency.
So the bots that actually work on Polymarket are algorithmic: they compute a ton of factors and trade based on that, plus they run highly optimized code. If you’re writing in Python or TypeScript, you might as well forget it you’ll be too slow when processing lots of events/markets, especially with heavier math. It makes more sense to build in Rust (there’s already an SDK), or at least Go though Go has no official SDK, so you’ll end up building your own SDK.
Don’t listen to people who don’t understand what they’re talking about. You won’t reliably “just buy for <$1” by placing two limit orders one side simply won’t fill. You need a large set of parameters to track price and dynamically set coefficients for both sides at minimum, some notion of a local trend.
The API documentation includes a built-in AI that you can ask dumb questions about how the CLOB works
Stay sharp and don’t fall for pointless hype.
peace ✌️
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