The system can look fine while trading the wrong thing
Market-selection errors are particularly dangerous: an incorrect but valid market accepts the order, so the platform appears to function normally.
FIELD NOTES / PREDICTION MARKETS
Minutes to decide.
One candle to act.
An automated prediction-market trading platform for short-duration candle markets — market discovery, candle timing, strategy state, sizing, execution, settlement and drawdown controls, run continuously across multiple assets and timeframes.
PREDICTION MARKET CASE STUDY
Candle Desk
Candle-bound execution.
On-chain settlement.
Candle Desk / Live market and positionsACTUAL PRODUCT INTERFACE
THE TIMING PROBLEMThe candle does not wait.
A strategy may have only minutes to identify the instrument, size capital, execute and prepare for the next candle.
Follow the execution ↗DiscoverTimeSizeExecuteSettle
DOMAIN
Prediction-market trading
WHAT WE BUILT
Automated execution platform
OUR ROLE
Architecture, execution & Web3 engineering
01 / THE REAL ENGINEERING PROBLEM
A valid market
can still be the wrong market.
On Polymarket, crypto “Up or Down” markets continuously resolve around the direction of individual price candles. A strategy may have only minutes to identify the correct instrument, determine its position, size capital, execute, track settlement, update strategy state, and prepare for the next candle.
That workflow becomes considerably harder when several strategies run simultaneously across multiple assets and timeframes.
Polymarket exposes many events with similar titles and overlapping metadata, so a keyword-only search can identify a different instrument entirely — and a technically valid but incorrect market will still accept an order.
Daylight saving breaks naive scheduling
Hourly and four-hour boundaries follow US Eastern wall-clock time. Adding a fixed number of seconds skips or misaligns markets across DST transitions — errors that only appear twice a year.
On a blockchain venue, a timeout is ambiguous
A failed request does not mean a failed trade. The outcome has to be established from the chain, not assumed from the response.
02 / INSIDE THE PRODUCT
Configure the strategy.
Let the candle close.
Four views of the delivered platform.
Each shows another part of the automated trading loop.
The instrument and the clock.
Live market state sits beside open positions, entry price and unrealised P&L — the context a candle-bound decision depends on.
THE CANDLE LOOP
Discover market→Align to boundary→Size position→Execute→Reconcile→Settle→Update state
03 / AMBIGUITY AND RECOVERY
A timeout is not
evidence of failure.
On a blockchain venue, an order that appears to fail may already have gone through. The platform verifies the on-chain outcome-token balance before deciding whether an ambiguous order actually failed.
Strategy state has to survive process restarts too, so the desk resumes from where it actually is rather than from where it last remembered being.
Look under the hood ↘01
Filter the market precisely
Discovery applies asset keywords, negative keywords, excluded tags, required market-type tags, timeframe tags and expected candle boundaries.
Treated as executed
The position is recorded and strategy state advances, even though the original request appeared to fail.
Treated as failed
Only then is the order considered unfilled, so a retry cannot duplicate a position that already exists.
02
Align to the real boundary
Timezone-aware boundary logic handles US Eastern wall-clock intervals, with regression tests covering both daylight-saving transitions.
03
Verify before concluding
An ambiguous order is resolved against the on-chain outcome-token balance rather than the request result.
04 / THE TECHNOLOGY & THE REASON
Small stack.
Strict about time and state.
The platform is deliberately modest in its dependencies, because the difficulty here is not scale — it is correctness around timing, ambiguity and recovery.
PY
EXECUTION ENGINE
Python + FastAPI
Runs market discovery, candle scheduling, strategy evaluation, sizing and the execution path.
Why one engine?
Discovery, timing and execution all depend on the same strategy state; separating them adds ways for them to disagree.
OPERATOR INTERFACE
React
The desk: live market state, strategy configuration, executions and performance analytics.
Why an interface at all?
An automated strategy still needs an operator who can see what it is doing and stop it.
CLOB
VENUE
Polymarket CLOB v2
The order book the platform trades against, with its own market metadata and settlement behaviour.
Why filter so hard?
Many events carry similar titles; the wrong market will still accept an order.
POLY
SETTLEMENT
Polygon
The chain the outcome tokens live on, and the source of truth for whether an ambiguous order filled.
Why check the chain?
The balance is the only thing that actually knows whether the trade happened.
DB
STRATEGY STATE
SQLite
Persists strategy state, positions and execution history so the desk survives restarts.
Why persist state?
A strategy that forgets its position on restart will size the next trade against the wrong picture.
OPS
OPERATIONS
AWS EC2, systemd & nginx
Runs the engine as a supervised long-lived service, restarted automatically and fronted for the operator interface.
Why supervised?
A candle strategy is only useful if it is actually running when the candle closes.
The architecture and product narrative reproduce the supplied project documentation. Interface values are product screen data and are not presented as investment results or evidence of future performance.
Explore the documented platform stack
- Execution engine
- Python · FastAPI · DST-aware candle scheduling · strategy state machine
- Operator interface
- React · market, strategy, execution and analytics views
- Venue & settlement
- Polymarket CLOB v2 · Polygon · on-chain outcome-token verification
- State
- SQLite · persisted strategy state, positions and execution history
- Operations
- AWS EC2 · systemd supervision · nginx
Technology names identify the documented implementation, not partnerships or endorsements.
A CONVERSATION ABOUT YOUR EXECUTION WORKFLOW
What does your system do
when the answer is unclear?
Bring one automated execution path. In 20 minutes, we will map where timing, ambiguity and recovery have to be handled explicitly rather than assumed.
20 minutes · Your venue, strategy and constraints