What Actually Changed for Bots

GitHub: https://github.com/abrownfox0/abrownfox001-twap60-prediction-trigger-system YouTube walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzhugRL6BV4 Live profile: https://polymarket.com/@abrownfox001 This is part 1 of a 5-part series on the latest Polymarket platform changes and the tech work they force on short-horizon bots. Part 1 — The change map (this post) Part 2 — TWAP60 settlement: what a 5m engine must pin Part 3 — Taker delay, rate limits, and execution reality Part 4 — Combos, APIs, and the new product surface Part 5 — What I am changing in the abrownfox001 stack The Last 60 Days Were Not Cosmetic If your mental model of Polymarket is still “5-minute BTC, last tick, spray taker orders,” the platform has moved. The updates that matter for builders, from late July through early September 2026: Date Change Why bots care Aug 4 RTDS delivers Chainlink TWAP over public WebSocket Official live series without separate Chainlink creds Aug 6 Volume-based CLOB rate tiers live Order/cancel spam is now a quota problem Aug 7 Snapshot settlement replaced by TWAP Last-tick models die Aug 14 5m crypto TWAP 30s → 60s The 5m target series changed again Aug 21 Combos public on Polymarket US New multi-leg product, RFQ not CLOB Sep 3 Short trading/API incident (open-order reads / DB lag) Need reconnect + stale-data guards Sep 4 Crypto taker delay 50ms → 150ms Latency edge compressed on purpose Sep 7 Polymarket live on Exa Connect New agent/tooling access path Same venue. Different machine. Three Layers Moved at Once Most writeups isolate one headline. Bots break when three layers move together. 1. Settlement layer 5-minute crypto Up/Down now pays a 60-second Chainlink TWAP , not a snapshot and not the first 30s window. Open and close must come from that family. 2. Matching layer Taker delay on crypto markets was raised to 150ms on September 4. Combined with earlier delay-lock behavior, “see tick, lift immediately, cancel if wrong” is a worse job. 3. Access layer Volume-tiered r