Polymarket opens NEX matching-engine sandbox
Polymarket is testing a rebuilt matching engine for its international platform. It reports faster internal processing and targets a release by year-end.
Polymarket has opened an early-access sandbox for NEX, a rebuilt matching engine for its international prediction market. Engineering lead Josh Stevens announced the test on 13 November in a post reported by Crypto Economy. Polymarket’s NEX documentation gives an end-of-2026 release target and leaves the production switch date open.
Approved testers can connect their existing integrations with new sandbox endpoints and credentials. The sandbox runs on Polygon’s Amoy test network with test pUSD, liquidity supplied by bots and order books separate from the live exchange. Polymarket rebuilt the matching engine and WebSocket feeds in Rust and says NEX is designed to work with existing order-book API integrations without breaking changes.
What Polymarket measured
In early tests that mirrored production orders, Polymarket reports more than a 200-fold improvement in internal processing for new orders. It says NEX can sustain 100,000 commands per second and handle bursts of 150,000. Those figures measure engine activity. Traders’ end-to-end wait for order and cancellation acknowledgements, along with live trade throughput, remain unverified.
For market makers, a faster engine matters if the improvement reaches their trading systems when quotes are moving. A useful test after the production switch would compare order and cancellation acknowledgement times and gaps in the live feeds before and after the change, using the same network location and comparable market conditions.
NEX concerns Polymarket’s international business. Its US exchange publishes a separate API changelog and has been changing its fees for multi-leg contracts on a separate schedule.