How Polycat works, and how to use it — in plain terms.
Polycat is a fixed 5-minute Up/Down market over a growing list of assets — not just BTC, ETH, and SOL. "Blue chip" tokens are priced via Gate.com; on-chain pairs (starting with CashCat, the first memecoin on Robinhood Chain) are priced via DexScreener. Every market is scoped to one asset and one 5-minute window. The asset's price at the moment the window opens is the strike; Down wins if the price is below the strike when the window closes, Up wins if it's above. New windows open automatically the moment the previous one settles, so there's always a live market for every registered asset. It's built on Robinhood Chain — the public Arbitrum-based Layer 2 Robinhood launched in July 2026 — and trades entirely in that chain's native ETH.
You need a crypto wallet (like MetaMask) and a little ETH to trade. Here's the full loop, start to finish.
Connect your wallet
Click "Connect Wallet" in the top right of the app. Approve the connection in your wallet — no signup, no email, no account.
Pick an asset
Head to the Markets tab. Each card is a live 5-minute window for one registered asset, showing the strike price and the current implied chance 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 trade history. Use the trade panel to buy Up or Down shares — either by entering how much ETH to spend, or the exact number of shares you want. Buying is a single transaction — no separate approval step, since ETH is native.
0.10
Hold, sell, or redeem
Sell 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. If the window closed at exactly the strike price, it's a push instead: claim a pro-rata refund rather than a win/loss.
You can buy by specifying either the ETH amount you want to spend, or the exact number of Up/Down shares you want to end up with — the app solves for the required cost either way. Selling always works in shares. Every winning share redeems for exactly 1 ETH once a market is settled, so the number of shares you hold is exactly your potential payout if that side wins.
New assets are added from the admin dashboard, not by writing code: search DexScreener (scoped to Robinhood Chain pairs) or Gate.com's tradable tokens, and registering one is the entire "add a market" action. From there it's fully automatic — a small script (see packages/cronin the repo) keeps every registered asset's 5-minute window running on a schedule, aligned to the clock (a window always starts on a multiple of 5 minutes since epoch). The same script settles a window the moment it closes: it reads the asset's live price — from Gate.com or DexScreener, whichever it was registered with — and submits it in a single transaction. The contract compares that price to the strike recorded when the window opened — below is a Down win, above is an Up win, an exact match is a push — and finalizes the outcome immediately. There's no admin judgment call and no dispute window; the rule is mechanical and the same every time.
Instead of matching buyers with sellers order-book style, every market is its own automated market maker using a Pythagorean bonding curve: reserve = c × √(upSupply² + downSupply²). Buying Up shares increases upSupply and pulls the price of Up up (and Down down) continuously — there's always someone to trade with, even for the very first trade in a brand-new window. The displayed "chance" percentage is exactly upSupply² / (upSupply² + downSupply²), independent of trading fees — and separate from the strike price itself, which only the recorded start/close price (not the curve) determines.
A flat protocol trading fee (1% by default) applies to every buy and sell, set globally by the protocol owner. It is not configurable per market. Every window is seeded with protocol-owned liquidity rather than a user-provided one, so all collected fees go to the protocol treasury.
Polycat is early. Here's where things stand today, and what's coming next.
Up/Down trading on Robinhood Chain
Fixed 5-minute windows over a growing asset list — BTC/ETH/SOL via Gate.com, CashCat (and any future Robinhood Chain memecoin) via DexScreener — opened and settled automatically.
Admin-added markets
New assets are added by searching DexScreener or Gate.com from the admin dashboard — no code change or redeploy needed.
No token
There is no Polycat token, and none is being sold or airdropped right now. Trading uses native ETH. Be wary of anyone claiming otherwise.
Native mobile app
A dedicated iOS/Android app for trading windows on the go.
More chains
Sourcing on-chain pairs from beyond Robinhood Chain as more memecoin activity moves there.
See the repo
Contract source and tests live in packages/contracts, the settlement/creation script in packages/cron, and the full architecture writeup in the repo's DOCS.md.
