Polymarket US adds 15-minute Bitcoin up-or-down contracts

Polymarket US began offering 15-minute Bitcoin contracts on Sept. 22, allowing traders to take a position on whether the cryptocurrency will end each quarter-hour at or above its opening level. The format can create as many as 96 separate markets in a day.

Each market settles to “Up” if Bitcoin’s ending price is equal to or higher than its starting price, and to “Down” otherwise. The contract is tied to CF Benchmarks’ Bitcoin Real-Time Index, rather than to a price from a particular exchange or the wider spot market.

The exchange calculates each endpoint by collecting 60 BRTI readings in the final minute before the relevant time and using their simple average, rounded to two decimal places. That methodology means a single late price print does not determine the result.

Traders buy shares in either outcome, and prices move with supply and demand. A share priced at 60 cents represents an implied 60% market estimate for that result; winning shares redeem for $1 after settlement, while holders can sell before resolution at the current market price.

Polymarket US is operated by QCX LLC, doing business as Polymarket US, which describes itself as a CFTC-regulated Designated Contract Market. The company characterizes its products as event derivatives.

Two days after the Bitcoin product launched, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a lawsuit alleging that QCX was operating an unlicensed gambling business, though the state’s petition does not mention Bitcoin or the 15-minute contracts and instead cites sports, political and entertainment markets.

The state seeks to bar unlicensed gambling operations in New York, along with fines, forfeiture of alleged illegal gains and restitution. It alleges that Polymarket lacks a New York State Gaming Commission licence and makes markets available to users aged 18 to 20, although the state requires mobile sports-betting participants to be at least 21.

The lawsuit sits within an unresolved jurisdictional conflict over prediction markets. In April, the CFTC sued New York seeking a declaration that federal law gives the agency exclusive authority over event contracts traded on federally registered exchanges, and an injunction against enforcement of state laws it regards as preempted.

The rapid Bitcoin format also arrives amid scrutiny of short-duration crypto contracts. Stanford researchers found trading patterns consistent with settlement manipulation in five-minute Bitcoin markets on Polymarket’s earlier platform, according to CCN, but said that pattern was largely absent from the 15-minute contracts they studied.

Short-term crypto-price markets are expanding elsewhere. DATA.BET introduced an “Up or Down” product on Sept. 8 with settlement periods as short as five minutes, alongside 15-minute, hourly, four-hour and daily rounds.

More broadly, the Congressional Research Service said federally regulated designated contract markets listed about 1,600 new event contracts in 2025, compared with an average of five annually between 2006 and 2020. It described these products as binary “Yes/No” contracts whose prices are commonly treated as market estimates of an event’s probability.