Polycat Docs
Everything you need to know to start trading, in plain English — from connecting a wallet for the first time to claiming your winnings.
What is Polycat?
Polycat is a simple bet: will an asset's price be up or down five minutes from now? Pick a side, and if you're right, you get paid. It's not just BTC, ETH, and SOL either — the list of tradable assets keeps growing. "Blue chip" tokens are priced using Gate.com, while on-chain pairs (starting with CashCat, the first memecoin on Robinhood Chain) are priced using DexScreener. Every market covers one asset and one 5-minute window: whatever the price is when the window opens becomes the strike, and when the window closes, Down wins if the price fell below it and Up wins if it rose above it. As soon as one window settles, the next one opens automatically, so there's always a fresh market waiting for every asset we support. Polycat runs on Robinhood Chain — the public Arbitrum-based Layer 2 that Robinhood launched in July 2026 — and every trade uses that chain's native ETH.
Getting started
All you need is a crypto wallet (like MetaMask) and a little ETH. No signup, no forms — you'll be trading in under a minute. Here's the whole loop, start to finish.
Connect your wallet
Click "Connect" in the top bar, pick your wallet from the list, and approve the connection. That's it — no account to create.
Pick an asset
Head over to the Markets tab. Each card is a live 5-minute window for one asset, showing the strike price it needs to beat and the current odds of Up.
Up or Down?
64%
chance Up
Up or Down?
41%
chance Up
Open a market and trade
Tap a card to see the live price chart against the strike, plus recent trades. Then use the trade panel to buy Up or Down shares — either enter how much ETH you want to spend, or the exact number of shares you're after. It's a single transaction to confirm, since ETH is native, so there's no separate approval step to worry about.
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Hold, sell, or redeem
Change your mind? Sell your shares back into the market any time before the window closes. Once it settles, head back to the market page (or your Portfolio) and redeem — each winning share pays out 1 ETH straight to your wallet. And if the price landed exactly on the strike, don't worry — that's a push, and you'll get a pro-rata refund instead of a win or loss.
Buying & selling
Every open market has two sides — Up and Down — and you're free to move in and out of a position any time before the window closes.
Buying shares
Pick a side (Up or Down), then choose however you'd rather think about it: Send ETH — spend an exact amount and get however many shares it buys — or Exact shares— tell it how many shares you want and it works out the ETH cost for you. One confirmation in your wallet and you're in — no separate approval step, since it's all native ETH.
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Selling shares
Selling is just as simple: enter how many of your Up or Down shares you want to sell back to the market, then confirm. You can do this any time before the window closes — there's no lockup and no waiting around for a buyer, since every market is its own automated market maker.
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Here's the simple part: every winning share pays out exactly 1 ETH once a market settles. So the number of shares you're holding is exactly your payout if that side wins — and the price you pay per share today just reflects the market's current odds.
Redeeming a win
Once a window closes, it settles automatically within moments — you don't need to do anything to trigger it. From there:
If your side won
Head to the market page (or your Portfolio, which lists every position you've ever held) and hit Claim winnings. Each winning share pays out exactly 1 ETH, sent straight to your wallet in a single transaction.
Outcome: Up
Winning shares: 0.24 ETH
If it was a push
Every so often the close price lands exactly on the strike, so neither side wins — that's called a push. No harm done: you'll see a Claim refund prompt on the market page that returns your pro-rata share of the pool. No losses either way.
No rush, either — there's no expiry on a claim. A winning or refundable position just sits there waiting for you to redeem it, whenever you get around to it.
Assets & settlement
Adding a new asset is as simple as searching for it — no code involved. From the admin dashboard, you search DexScreener (for Robinhood Chain pairs) or Gate.com's tradable tokens, and registering one is the entire "add a market" step. Everything after that runs itself: a small background script keeps every asset's 5-minute windows ticking on schedule, always starting on a clean 5-minute mark. The same script settles a window the moment it closes — it reads the asset's live price and submits it on-chain. From there, the outcome is decided mechanically: below the strike is a Down win, above is an Up win, and an exact match is a push. No admin judgment calls, no dispute windows — just the same rule, applied the same way, every time.
How prices work: the bonding curve
There's no order book here, and no waiting for someone to take the other side of your trade. Instead, every market prices itself using a simple formula (a "bonding curve") that reacts instantly to buying and selling. The more Up shares people buy, the more expensive Up gets and the cheaper Down gets — and vice versa — so there's always a price to trade at, even for the very first trade in a brand-new window. The "chance" percentage you see on each market is just that curve's live readout of the odds, and it's completely separate from the strike price, which is locked in the moment the window opens and never moves.
Fees
Keeping it simple: there's one flat fee, 1% by default, on every buy and sell — same rate for every market, no surprises. You never have to fund or manage liquidity yourself, since each window starts out seeded by the protocol, so those fees just go toward keeping the whole thing running.
Token
A Polycat utility token is in the works — nothing to buy, connect, or claim yet, and trading today is 100% ETH, no token required. Once it's live, the plan is for it to power a few things:
Official contract address
Published early so nothing else can convincingly claim to be "the" Polycat token. This is the only official one — always double-check before you trust any other, and never trade against it through anything but this contract directly, since it isn't wired into this app's trading flow yet.
Governance
Voting on protocol parameters — things like the trading fee rate or which new assets get listed.
Fee deductions
Holding or using it toward a trade is planned to knock down the flat trading fee below the default rate.
Trader incentives
A rewards pool for active traders, separate from — not funded by — the protocol fees themselves.
Season 1 leaderboard
A first competitive season ranking traders, with token rewards planned for top finishers.
The contract above is deployed and real; governance, fee deductions, incentives, and the leaderboard aren't live yet — this section gets updated as each one actually ships.