Polymarket has partnered with OpenWorlds to bring autonomous AI agents to prediction markets covering politics, sports, and thousands of other events.
Summary
- OpenWorlds says its agents can search for markets, evaluate events, and place trades.
- The company is developing the service for consumers and retail traders.
- Polymarket’s international platform and regulated U.S. operation have different access rules.
- A New York lawsuit has challenged Polymarket’s sports contracts under state gambling law.
According to OpenWorlds’ announcement and information shared with crypto.news, the AI lab is working with Polymarket to let agents handle steps that traders would otherwise perform themselves: finding an event market, assessing it, and making a trade. OpenWorlds describes its software as a way to run that process repeatedly across live markets.
The company says it is building personal trading agents for consumers and retail traders. Its proposed workflow gives an agent the ability to search across markets and act on its assessment, rather than presenting a list of possible trades for a person to execute manually. OpenWorlds also compares the process with the research and trading work carried out by investment firms.
How OpenWorlds agents would trade on Polymarket
OpenWorlds describes three linked tasks for its agents: discovery, evaluation, and trading. In practice, an agent searching Polymarket would need to identify a contract tied to a specific event before assessing the available information and deciding whether to take a position. The company says its system is designed to repeat that process as events and markets change.
Polymarket lists contracts tied to outcomes in politics, sports, and other subjects. Prices in those markets move as participants buy and sell positions before an event is resolved. OpenWorlds’ proposal places an automated trader in that existing process, with the agent carrying out the research and execution steps described by the company.
For a retail user, the degree of control given to an agent matters because finding a market and placing an order are different actions. OpenWorlds’ privacy policy says users own their wallets through their chosen wallet provider and that the company does not collect or store private keys. It also says its services may support delegated signing for AI operations.
The policy says OpenWorlds records agent configurations, action logs, and results. When a user enables an integration, requests and related data can be sent to a third-party market platform to execute actions and return results, according to the company. OpenWorlds also says it uses data from AI system activity to train and improve its models and platform features.
The partnership brings the agent workflow to a platform that has been changing how trading information reaches its applications. In September, Polymarket moved its main blockchain indexing system in-house. Vice President of Engineering Josh Stevens said the new setup could surface some onchain events up to 14 blocks, or about 28 seconds, faster, while Goldsky remained available as a backup. The indexing system update covers data behind trades, positions, and balances.
Polymarket integrations have expanded beyond its own app
Other companies have also built ways for users to reach Polymarket markets through separate products. In August, Fortune Protocol integrated Polymarket liquidity into Fortune Markets alongside Predict.fun. Its interface lets users compare liquidity, trading volume, and market probabilities, then choose an outcome and preview a position before trading.
OpenWorlds describes a different set of functions. Its announcement focuses on an agent that searches, evaluates and trades, while Fortune’s integration presents market information and a trading flow to the user. Both arrangements involve outside products interacting with prediction markets, but the companies describe different roles for their software.
Polymarket’s own technology work has also included automated execution tools. As covered in September, the company acquired DeFi infrastructure startup Brahma in March, adding programmable smart-account technology intended to support wallets, deposits, asset routing and redemption of prediction-market outcome tokens. Polymarket had also purchased the registered derivatives exchange QCEX and prediction-market data company Dome.
U.S. access depends on which Polymarket platform is used
For American traders, Polymarket’s international blockchain platform and its regulated U.S. operation are separate. Following a 2022 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Polymarket agreed to prevent U.S. customers from using its international operation. It later returned to the U.S. market through a CFTC-registered exchange it acquired. An August report on Polymarket’s midterm surveillance described the distinction between the two operations.
Polymarket’s global head of investigations and intelligence, Shana Bautista, told Reuters in August that the company combines machine learning, blockchain analytics and trade surveillance to identify unusual activity. Polymarket said it had referred more than 100 cases to law enforcement. Its monitoring work included preparations for trading tied to the U.S. midterm elections.
State rules present another question for U.S. access to event contracts. On Sep. 24, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Polymarket over sports contracts, alleging that it offered gambling products without a state license and allowed users aged 18 to 20 onto its platform. The state is seeking to stop the alleged unlicensed activity, obtain customer restitution, and impose civil penalties. Polymarket can contest the allegations in court.
The New York petition cites contracts tied to sports outcomes, including a July baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets. State officials argue that federal oversight of event contracts does not remove New York’s authority over sports wagering. Prediction-market operators have argued in related cases that qualifying contracts traded on federally regulated exchanges fall under CFTC jurisdiction.