Polymarket runs four entirely separate return mechanisms. English calls them all rebates; Chinese calls them all 返利. They are four rulebooks, four pools, four payout times, with unrelated eligibility. A guide that does not name which one is essentially saying nothing.
| # | Name | Who gets it | Earned by | Paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ① | Maker rebate | the poster | your quote being filled | next day ~00:45Z |
| ② | Taker ladder | the taker | 30-day rolling weighted volume | daily 00:00Z |
| ③ | LP rewards | the poster | quote quality — no fill needed | daily ~00:45Z |
| ④ | Referral | the referrer | your recruit paying taker fees | daily 00:00Z |
① and ③ both pay posters, and their triggers are exact opposites: ① needs a fill, ③ does not. That alone sends two strategies in opposite directions — §5.
Three of the four are funded directly or indirectly by the taker fee, so price it first. Posters pay nothing; the fee sits entirely on the taker:
Counter-intuitively the fee is heaviest at p = 0.50 and cheaper toward both tails. 50¢ costs $1.75 per 100 shares; 95¢ costs $0.33.
I recovered it by reconciliation: predict a market-making wallet's full-day rebate from the formula,
compare against what landed. Predicted $45.23, received $46.58 — 97%
(the gap is 43 unrecorded minutes at the start).
Also: the CLOB config's maker_base_fee/taker_base_fee read 1000.
That is a raw config field, not a rate. Do not compute with it.
When your quote is hit, 20% of that taker's fee returns to you — about +0.25¢/share, settled daily around 00:45 UTC.
The load-bearing sentence: it exists only on fills, and is unrelated to how long you quoted. So wanting this money means wanting to be filled — and wanting to be filled means accepting adverse selection, where the fills you get are the ones you did not want. This subsidy is a fixed 0.25¢/share racing a variable cost.
No registration and no code — hit the volume and you tier up. The unit is not notional but a weighted volume:
| Category | Weight |
|---|---|
| Crypto | 2.3 |
| Econ · Culture · Weather | 1.7 |
| Politics · Finance · Tech | 1.3 |
| Sports | 1.0 |
| Geopolitics | 0 (excluded) |
| Tier | 30-day wV | Rebate | Promotion bonus | Effective uplift |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bronze | $2k | 3% | +$10 | 0.05pp |
| Silver | $20k | 8% | +$50 | 0.14pp |
| Gold | $200k | 18% | +$250 | 0.32pp |
| Platinum | $1M | 32% | +$1.5k | 0.56pp |
| Diamond | $4M | 44% | +$7.5k | — |
| Obsidian | $10M | 50% | +$25k | — |
It returns a percentage of the fees you paid, not of notional — the column people misread. Paid daily at 00:00Z straight into balance, $1 minimum.
Scored on quote quality — how close to mid, how much, how long — filled or not. Settled daily around 00:45Z.
clobRewards:[] does not mean the board has no rewards
An empty array from the events endpoint does not imply "no pool".
The authoritative source is the CLOB's sampling-markets endpoint. Likewise
rewardsMinSize/maxSpread are metadata — their presence does not mean money is paid.
Measured counter-example: on crypto up/down, live 1h and 15m boards return
empty from /rewards/markets, and 5m returns a placeholder
(rate_per_day: 0.001). In other words market making up/down earns essentially none of ③ —
that lane's only subsidy is ①.
| ① Maker rebate | ③ LP rewards | |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | must be filled | pays without a fill |
| You want | tight quotes, get hit | qualifying quotes, ideally not hit |
| Main risk | adverse selection | bad fills when swept |
| Available | any board with a taker fee | only boards in the reward programme |
So "market making" here is two different businesses depending on which you are chasing — and why copying someone's approach so often fails: they are collecting ③ while you think you are collecting ①.
Most important first: current terms date from 2026-05-28. Before that it was 30% for 180 days; it was cut to 10% for 30 days. Large numbers of guides in both languages still quote the old figures. As checked in 2026-08:
| Item | Current |
|---|---|
| Who is paid | the referrer receives 10% of the recruit's net taker fees; indirect referrals pay 5% |
| The recruit receives | nothing. "Signup bonus" claims on third-party sites are marketing |
| "Net fee" | venue receipts = taker fee − the recruit's own ladder rebate (so ② erodes ④) |
| Duration | 30 days from signup, or until they reach Platinum |
| Eligibility | the referrer needs $10k lifetime volume before earning |
| Binding | ?r=<code> → 30-day cookie → locked at web signup. New accounts only |
The terms explicitly forbid self-referrals, referring accounts you control, and inauthentic trading, and reserve the right to disqualify and claw back.
Worse, the exposure is collective: the terms permit removing an offender from every reward programme — so chasing ④ can cost you ① ② and ③ as well. And detection is close to free: transfers between wallets one person controls are public on-chain. Limited upside, unlimited downside.
Polymarket supports connecting a wallet or signing up by email — the email route generates a custodial wallet, so no prior crypto experience is needed.
If you are going to sign up anyway, you can use my referral link: 👉注册Polymarket. Per §7 above, the recruit gets neither a discount nor a bonus, so it makes no difference to your costs either way. Consider it encouragement to keep writing these. Not using it is entirely fine — nothing here gets shorter because of it.
Practical notethe binding happens at the moment of web signup and only for new accounts. Existing accounts cannot be attached retroactively.
Measured on one basis — effective uplift, restated as points off each trade. The fee is about 1.75pp at p≈0.5; ② contributes its tier rate × 1.75pp, and ④ roughly 10%:
Both maxed only moves the required gross edge from about 1.75pp to about 1.5pp. Rebates are a multiplier, not an addend — they improve a positive strategy and cannot rescue a negative one.
A real-money up/down taker line: about 496 windows, roughly 41 hours, net −$496.51, of which fees were $145 and ladder rebates actually received were $0.
Basisthe ledger recorded the $0 and not the reason. It may relate to the line running only ~41 hours (the ladder is a 30-day rolling measure, paid daily, $1 minimum), but I did not verify that, so I am not stating it as a conclusion.
Either way it does not change what matters: that line's problem was not "just short, rebates would fix it". The edge was absent. Rebates cover about 10%; the gap was 100% — an order of magnitude. Maxed out, it stays negative.
| Time | What lands |
|---|---|
| 00:00Z | ② taker ladder · ④ referral (pUSD, straight to balance) |
| ~00:45Z | ① maker rebate · ③ LP rewards paid as batched transfers, roughly 400 per batch |
They are transfers, not trade P&L. The leaderboard's /profit field
therefore contains no subsidy income at all. Real net income requires
trading P&L + total received, queried separately and summed.
This makes you systematically underrate subsidy-driven players — and systematically overrate your own strategy, if you counted subsidies as strategy income.
Next time you see "Polymarket rebates", ask which one: paid on fills (①), tiered on volume (②), paid for resting (③), or paid for recruiting (④). Four answers, four completely different businesses.
0.07·p(1−p)·shares against next-day receipts:
$45.23 predicted / $46.58 received (97%)./rewards/markets for live 1h / 15m / 5m boards.