Polymarket US adds five-minute crypto direction contracts

Polymarket US has introduced five-minute up-or-down contracts on bitcoin, ether, solana and XRP, giving U.S. users a shorter window in which to take a view on the direction of the four cryptocurrencies. The products went live in the app on Oct. 27.

Each market asks whether a token will end a five-minute interval above or below its opening level. Traders buy an outcome rather than the underlying asset; the winning side pays $1 a contract, while the losing position pays nothing. Polymarket announced that “5 minute crypto up/downs are now live in the Polymarket US app.”

The contracts resolve to Up when the closing reference value is equal to or greater than the opening value, making an exact tie an Up result. Bitcoin uses CF Benchmarks’ Bitcoin Real-Time Index, while ether, solana and XRP use the provider’s respective dollar real-time indices.

Rather than using a single price at either endpoint, Polymarket averages 60 index observations from the preceding minute. Bitcoin and ether values are rounded to two decimal places for settlement, solana to four and XRP to five. The platform’s use of a time-weighted average price is intended to reduce the scope for last-second price manipulation.

As reported in September, Polymarket US had already added 15-minute Bitcoin up-or-down contracts. It expanded the broader crypto range on Oct. 15 with 15-minute, hourly and daily markets for ether, solana and XRP, before extending the five-minute format across all four tokens.

The shorter contracts arrive after Polymarket changed settlement procedures for short-duration crypto markets in August. CoinDesk reported that the shift away from snapshot settlement followed trader complaints and research identifying activity consistent with settlement manipulation, including unusually large Binance orders shortly before expiry that were followed by rapid Bitcoin reversals.

Researchers at Stanford University and Singapore Management University examined roughly two months of five-minute Bitcoin contracts and identified 821 accounts that collectively made an estimated $8.2 million in settlement windows they classified as likely manipulated. Excluding market makers, retail traders bore 93% of losses in those windows, according to the study.

Polymarket US is operated by QCX LLC, a CFTC-regulated designated contract market. Its dollar-denominated U.S. venue is separate from Polymarket’s international blockchain-based product. More frequent contracts provide additional entry points for traders, although repeated trading can increase fees and spread costs; Polymarket’s published example puts the liquidity-taking fee at $1.74 for 100 contracts priced at 50 cents, before volume-tier rebates.