PolySouq explained: trade Bitcoin, gold, EUR/USD and football as probabilities

What a prediction market is

A prediction market lists a question with a fixed set of answers and puts a price on each one. The price runs from 0 to 100 and reads as a probability: an answer priced at 57 is the crowd saying there is a 57% chance it happens. On PolySouq you buy YES or NO on a two-answer market, or one answer on a market with three or more, and the money you put in is your stake on that answer.

PolySouq is buy-only. A position is held until the event resolves; there is no order to unwind before then. That makes each position a decision rather than something you manage: you choose how much you are prepared to lose, you buy, and you wait for the outcome. The upside is simplicity and no leverage; the trade-off is that you cannot change your mind halfway.

What you can trade on PolySouq

The catalogue has three kinds of market. Price windows on crypto, forex and commodities ask whether the price will be higher or lower at the end of a short, fixed window. Football markets ask who wins a fixture. Event markets on politics, economics and technology usually have three or more answers.

Silver has the same Up/Down windows as gold. Beyond the table, the politics, economics and technology sections carry multi-outcome events with three or more answers, which is the most common event shape on the platform.

How the payout works

PolySouq settles each event as a pool, not an order book. All YES stakes go into one pot and all NO stakes into another. Take a market where the YES pool holds $600 and the NO pool $400 at close, so the screen shows YES at 60. You staked $100 on YES.

1. YES wins. The $400 NO pool is the losing pot. A 10% commission is taken from that pot only: $40. The remaining $360 is shared among YES backers pro rata. Your $100 is one-sixth of the $600 YES pool, so you receive one-sixth of $360, which is $60, plus your $100 back. Total returned: $160.
2. NO wins. YES is the losing side. Your $100 goes into the losing pot and you receive $0. The loss is exactly $100, never more, because there is no leverage and no margin call.
3. Nobody backed the other side. If every stake was on YES and YES won, there is no losing pot and no commission. Every stake is refunded in full. The same happens if you were alone on a market, and on any market that is voided.

The commission never touches a winner's own stake: winners get 100% of their money back plus their share of 90% of the losing pot. There is no spread, no deposit fee and no monthly fee; the 10% slice of the losing pot is the platform's only revenue from a market.

Prediction market vs leveraged trading

Readers of this site mostly trade shares, CFDs or forex. The table sets the two products side by side so the differences are explicit rather than implied.

Neither product is safer in the abstract. A leveraged account can lose more than you put in; a prediction market cannot, but it also cannot be exited early. The right question is which risk you would rather carry.

Opening an account and funding it

PolySouq runs on one funding rail: USDC on the Polygon network, for both deposits and withdrawals, $5 minimum in each direction. There are no cards and no bank transfers. If you already hold USDC on an exchange that supports Polygon withdrawals, the whole process takes minutes.

1. Sign up at polysouq.com/en/signup with email and password, Google or Apple.
2. Verify your email address; trading is locked until you do.
3. Pick the topics you follow so the feed shows relevant events first.
4. Open Portfolio, then Add funds, and copy your personal USDC deposit address on Polygon.
5. Send USDC on the Polygon network ($5 minimum). The balance shows in dollars.
6. Choose an event and buy YES or NO, or one answer on a multi-outcome event.

Withdrawals go back out the same way: USDC on Polygon, $5 minimum. Create a PolySouq account and verify the email before funding; the deposit address is only shown to a verified account.

Friends, leaderboard and the Ideas feed

Every account has a personal invite link under Settings. Friends who join through it can be challenged on the same events, and a weekly accuracy leaderboard ranks members by how often they were right, not by how much they staked. If you take a position and nobody takes the other side, your money comes back.

The Ideas feed is where members publish their reasoning on a market, and every event has a comment thread. Once an event resolves, its page shows the outcome and the source it was settled from. Settlement is automated by consensus of public sources, with human review for unclear cases. The platform is operated by a Cyprus-registered company.

We built PolySouq so that a view on Bitcoin, gold or a football match can be stated as a probability and settled against what actually happened, with the rules of the payout visible before anyone puts money in.

Is PolySouq a betting site?

It is often the first question, so here is the difference. In betting and gambling an operator sets odds and takes the other side of your wager; it profits when you lose. On PolySouq no operator takes the other side. The price of each answer is the share of the pool on it, so it is a probability formed by other members, and the platform earns a commission only from the losing pot. If nobody backs the opposing answer, there is no counterparty and your stake is refunded.

The correct label is prediction market or event trading: probabilities, a public settlement source per market and a payout formula you can check by hand. Whether that fits your own view of risk is a separate question, and the answer should be based on the arithmetic above.

Risk note

You can lose the full amount you stake on any market. Prices are probabilities formed by other members, not forecasts, and a probability of 90 still means the outcome fails one time in ten. Nothing here is investment advice; PolySouq is a third-party platform and this site has no access to your account.