Building a Spike Bot for Polymarket's 5-Minute Bitcoin Markets

Every five minutes, Polymarket lists a new question: Will Bitcoin be higher at the end of this window than at the start? You can buy Up or Down . One side pays $1. The other pays $0. The market resolves using Chainlink BTC/USD — not Coinbase, not Binance. That last detail matters more than most people expect. This post is a rough, developer-friendly overview of a spike bot we built to trade those windows. It explains the shape of the system — feeds, decision loop, risk, logging — without publishing the parts that actually make it work: momentum math, tuned parameters, hedge mechanics, or when we choose to run it. Think of this as the architecture blog post, not the strategy leak. Why these markets are interesting (and annoying) Five-minute binary markets are a strange hybrid: They behave like options (probability priced between $0 and $1). They settle like oracles (Chainlink, on a schedule). They trade like retail sports books (fast repricing, thin books, emotional flow). The friction creates opportunity — but only if your bot understands which price is authoritative and which price is merely early. We run two price feeds in parallel: Feed Role Chainlink (via Polymarket RTDS) Resolution price. Slow but official. A fast exchange lead feed Early warning. Moves before the oracle updates. The bot's thesis is simple to state and hard to execute: When spot moves sharply, the prediction market sometimes lags. If you can detect the move early and buy the underpriced side before the book catches up, you have edge. We call that a spike bot — not because it only trades violent moves, but because entries are triggered by short-term momentum events rather than a fixed countdown window. System architecture (the boring, important part) Most of the complexity lives in plumbing. The strategy is one module; the infrastructure is the product. ┌─────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ │ Chainlink RTDS │ │ Lead exchange WS │ │ (oracle) │ │ (fast spot) │ └────────┬────────┘ └────────┬────