Polymarket pays users to keep its markets liquid. Rewards accrue from resting limit orders posted near a market’s midpoint price. The closer orders sit to the midpoint, and the more both sides are quoted, the higher the score.Orders do not need to be filled to earn. Keeping competitive limit orders resting in the book is sufficient.
1
Post limit orders near the midpoint
Buy and sell limit orders placed close to the market’s average price qualify for rewards.
2
The book is scored continuously
Approximately once a minute, Polymarket samples the order book and scores each resting order by its distance from the midpoint.
3
Two-sided quoting earns more
Quoting both sides earns substantially more than a single side—close to three times as much in practice.
4
Rewards pay out daily
Earnings are tallied daily and paid around midnight UTC above a minimum payout threshold. Days below the threshold are not paid and do not roll over.
Two separate incentive programs reward different behavior:
Liquidity Rewards
Pays for orders resting near the midpoint, whether or not they fill. This is the primary target of reward farming.
Maker Rebates
Pays a share of taker fees when a resting order is filled, earned only when a trade executes against it.
A single resting order can collect a liquidity reward for sitting in the book and a maker rebate if it fills. The two stack, and Flowlayer accounts for both to show a true combined return.
Reward income is not risk-free. The central hazard is the adverse fill.
Because orders rest near the midpoint, they can fill immediately before a sharp price move. The resulting position—or the market’s final resolution—can produce a loss large enough to erase days of rewards.
The danger typically arrives as a fill during a volatility spike rather than gradually as resolution approaches. Effective safety tooling therefore responds to volatility, fills, and news, not only the resolution clock. This principle drives Flowlayer’s risk score and alerts.
The markets best suited to farming share a profile: high reward rate and low volatility. Low volatility reduces the chance of holding a losing position when news breaks. High-volatility, news-driven markets may advertise large spreads and rewards but carry the greatest adverse-fill risk.
Flowlayer’s ranking surfaces markets that pay well relative to their risk, not the markets that simply pay the most.