Polymarket affiliate program review: builders charge up to 1% on routed orders, paid daily from $0.10, under a code that can be revoked for no reason

Polymarket’s affiliate program is not a referral link. It is a builder program: a third-party application attaches a code to every order it routes to Polymarket, charges the trader a fee of its own on top of Polymarket’s, and is paid that fee the next day. The builder fee page, read on 29 October 2026, caps the charge at 1% of notional on taker orders and 0.5% on maker orders, pays daily for the previous UTC day from a $0.10 floor, and reserves the right to revoke the charge “for any reason or no reason”. A separate weekly USDC reward “based on integration volume” has run since 2 November 2025 and has never had a published rate. We read the builder documents, the Code of Conduct, the platform terms, the retail and Perps referral rules and a publisher offer hosted on Dub to sort out which promise belongs to which program. Our score is 6.5/10.

Who runs the program

The international site’s terms of use, effective 11 August 2026, are issued by Adventure One QSS, Inc., with Blockratize Inc. as software developer. Governing law is “the Panama Arbitration Law and the laws of Panama”, disputes go to arbitration under section 8 with a class-action waiver, and the page gives no registered address or company number. The footer states that “Polymarket operates globally through separate legal entities”: Polymarket US is QCX LLC, “a CFTC-regulated Designated Contract Market”, and “this international platform is not regulated by the CFTC and operates independently”. The CFTC’s register confirms the first half: entry 49571, QCX LLC d/b/a Polymarket US, designated on 9 July 2025. The builder program lives on the international side; opened from a United States connection, the terms page adds a banner that trading “is blocked in the United States on polymarket.com”.

The program is documented in the developer docs (overview, fees, tiers), the builder portal with its leaderboard, FAQ and grant form, and the Code of Conduct of 3 August 2026. There is no separate builder agreement: section 6 of the platform terms makes any “Program” subject to terms set “in its sole discretion” and lets the company “modify, suspend, or discontinue any Program at any time without notice or liability”. The changelog records CLOB V2 going live on 28 April 2026 with builder attribution “native via builderCode on orders” and pUSD replacing USDC.e. The portal is older: the Internet Archive’s first capture, on 2 November 2025, already carried “$1M+ in grants”, the weekly-rewards line and a leaderboard led by Betmoar.fun at $28.98 million. The headline now reads “$2.5M+” and Betmoar.fun shows $141.45 million of one-month volume.

The top 50 of that leaderboard on 29 October is mostly trading terminals and bots, but it also holds Gate ($65.45 million), Jupiter ($17.25 million), MetaMask ($14.66 million), RedotPay ($12.45 million), Bitget Wallet ($6.87 million), KuCoin ($2.17 million), Axiom ($1.42 million) and Phemex ($1.30 million). Two of those have their own entries in this series, RedotPay and Axiom. The figures are attributed volume; they say nothing about what any builder charged or earned.

Entry has three tiers on the tier page. Unverified is open to any account: create a builder profile under Settings and get 100 relayer transactions a day for gasless wallet operations. Verified takes an email to builder@polymarket.com with a use case and expected volume, answered “within a few business days”; it raises the allowance to 10,000 a day and adds the leaderboard, a private Telegram channel, and the weekly rewards and grants “subject to approval”. Partner is unlimited and negotiated. The page contradicts itself on one point: its comparison table marks “Builder Fees: Yes” for all three tiers, while the Verified section lists “Monetize with Builder fees” among the things it “unlocks over Unverified”. Ask which is true before building on the free tier in the expectation of charging.

Commission structure

There is no revenue share. The builder adds a charge to the trader’s bill, and that charge is the commission. The fee page sets a default of 0 basis points on both sides, a maximum of 100 bps (1%) on taker orders and 50 bps (0.5%) on maker orders, a 1 bp step, and a change policy “so users can see them coming”: one change per seven days, effective three days after scheduling, one pending change at a time. The fee is a flat percentage of notional and stacks on Polymarket’s own taker-only platform fee: “builder fees never replace platform fees”. Builder profiles and their rates are “publicly queryable”, so a trader can look up what your app charges before using it.

Route	Rate	Per $1,000 of notional	Who pays
Prediction-market builder fee, taker side	0% default, up to 1%	Up to $10.00	The trader, on top of Polymarket’s taker fee
Prediction-market builder fee, maker side	0% default, up to 0.5%	Up to $5.00	The trader
Perps builder fee	Up to 0.1%, approved by the trader first	Up to $1.00	The trader; credited to the builder’s Perps account immediately
Weekly builder reward	Unpublished, “subject to approval”	Unknown	Polymarket, in USDC
Grants	“$2.5M+” available, awarded on “product innovation and traction”	Not a commission	Polymarket

Sources: the builder fee page, the Perps builder-code page, the tier page and the portal FAQ, read on 29 October 2026. The per-$1,000 column is our arithmetic at the published ceilings.

The ceiling is high next to the other builder-code programs in this series: Ostium charges 50 bps and Lighter caps builders at 10 bps. The rate is yours only as long as users accept it: the charge is public and the same trade costs no builder fee on polymarket.com itself, so a terminal charging 1% competes with a free front door. An app that only posts resting orders earns at most 0.5%. Perps has its own builder-code rules: the trader approves a maximum fee rate before the first attributed order, the cap is “currently 10 basis points”, the fee lands “immediately in their Perps account”, builder and trader “must be different accounts”, and liquidations, backstop transfers and automatic deleveraging are excluded.

Two retail schemes run alongside and are easy to mistake for the builder program. The referral program, in force since 28 May 2026, pays 10% of a direct referral’s net trading fees and 5% of an indirect one’s, daily in pUSD, but only to referrers with $10,000 of lifetime trading volume, only for 30 days after the referral signs up, and only until the referral reaches the Platinum rebate tier, $1 million of 30-day weighted volume on the taker-rebate page. “Net” means after the referred trader’s own rebate. Free markets, “including Geopolitical and world events markets”, pay nothing, and “third-party integrations using omnibus wallets are not eligible”. The Perps referral program pays 20% of the trading fees of every referred Perps trader, weekly, with no cap per trader; a code starts with 10 invites and reaches 500 only at $1 million of eligible volume.

A fourth door is a publisher offer hosted on Dub, partners.dub.co/polymarket: “Earn 20% revenue share commission on Predictions and Perps”, an application form, a “sale” defined as a user’s first deposit of at least $20, payment by Stripe once approved earnings pass $100, and approval “typically within 1 business day but can take up to 5 business days if we suspect fraudulent activity”. The program configuration embedded in the page sets a 30-day holding period the FAQ never mentions, and the FAQ says Polymarket has “no trading fees”, which the fee documents contradict. The page was published on 27 October 2026, names no paying company, and is linked from Dub’s customer directory but from no polymarket.com page we found. We did not score it; a publisher rather than a developer should ask about that page, not the builder program.

Attribution and cookies

Attribution is per order, not per customer. The overview credits “every matched trade where your code is attached”; the order documentation puts the builder code inside the signed order, and the settlement contracts emit it with every fill, so attribution is on-chain and anyone can check it. A user you introduced who later trades on polymarket.com directly, or through another app, earns you nothing, and the Code of Conduct says so: “trades executed directly on Polymarket.com are not eligible for attribution”. There is no cookie, no click rule, no lifetime attachment and no sub-affiliate share, because there is no customer to attach. A newsletter cannot run this program; an app can. The retail link has conventional mechanics instead: signup within 30 days of the click, earnings for 30 days from signup. A Perps referral code binds once and “cannot switch to a different code later”.

Payouts

Builder fees are “distributed to the wallet associated with your builder profile”, daily, each payout covering the previous UTC day. The minimum is $0.10 a day; below it “no payout is sent for that day”, and the page is silent on whether the amount accumulates. No payout hour, holdback or transfer fee is stated. Fees are calculated in pUSD, an ERC-20 on Polygon “backed by USDC” and unwrapped to USDC.e through a public contract; the weekly-reward pages say USDC. We did not run an integration, so the schedule here is the published one.

The weekly reward has a calendar and nothing else: epochs from Sunday 00:00 UTC to Saturday 23:59 UTC, “based on integration volume”, “subject to approval”. No amount, formula, minimum, claim step or transfer date. Grants go “to the best teams based on product innovation and traction” through the portal form. Neither is money a builder can put in a forecast.

The terms that bite

The Code of Conduct is short, dated 3 August 2026, and “a condition of participation, not a suggestion”. The clauses that cost money:

Clause	What it does to a builder
“Disclose your fees” to each user before they trade	Your charge must be visible in your own interface, not only on Polymarket’s public builder profile.
“Press releases, marketing, and any use of our name or logo require our prior written approval”	Every campaign naming Polymarket needs permission first. No brand-bidding or paid-search rule is published, so this clause is the rule.
“Exclude Restricted Persons”, use the screening and geoblocking controls “and never bypass them”	You run the country checks and answer for the users you let through.
Trades on Polymarket.com not eligible; “an omnibus or pooled wallet” not eligible for taker rebates or referral rewards	Only trades signed through your app count, and a pooled-wallet design forfeits the retail rewards.
Keep records of “integration, fees, and compliance controls” and share them “on request”	Audit on demand.
Consequences “at our sole discretion”: revocation of codes, “forfeiture of any and all past or future grants and rewards”, “clawback of rewards already paid” on non-genuine volume, “a public statement of dissociation”	Paid rewards are not safe once paid, and a dispute can end with a public notice.

The platform terms add the general powers. Section 4.3 lets the company request “information to confirm that you are not a Restricted Person” and, on an inadequate answer, “prohibit you from participating in any reward or incentive programs”; a wallet login is no exemption from identity checks. Section 6 lets any program be changed or discontinued “at any time without notice”. The fee page reserves the right to revoke fee charging “in its sole discretion, for any reason or no reason”, and a disabled code is more than lost income: “orders carrying a disabled code will be rejected”, so your product stops trading.

Geography is where the documents disagree. The terms bar anyone who resides in, is located in or is incorporated in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Taiwan, Thailand and four Canadian provinces, and put violators’ wallets “in close-only mode”. The developer geoblock list, the one builders are told to check before placing orders, sorts the same countries differently: seven OFAC jurisdictions blocked outright, 37 “close-only on frontend and API” including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, and five “close-only on frontend” where “the API itself is not restricted”: Ireland, Japan, Malta (sports only), the Netherlands and South Korea. The help centre article of 14 August 2026 lists 39 countries as “completely restricted”, including those five, says German positions “must be held until market resolution” rather than closed, and bases travel on “physical location rather than residency”, which the terms do not. An API that accepts an Irish or Dutch order is not permission to serve Ireland or the Netherlands; get the list you are expected to enforce in writing. Co-location, the same page notes, “is not available to Builder Program participants”.

What affiliates report

Trustpilot’s page for polymarket.com showed 1.3 out of 5 from 656 reviews on 29 October 2026, 346 of them in the last twelve months; the profile has been claimed since July 2024 and had replied to none of its negative reviews. Sixteen of the twenty most recent reviewers are in the United States and write about sports bets, deposit bonuses, accounts frozen pending identity checks and slow withdrawals, which places most of them on Polymarket US rather than on the international platform the builder program belongs to. One review of 18 October complains that the company “don’t honor referrals”; it is a retail complaint, not a builder’s. We found no report, on Trustpilot or in the affiliate forums, of a builder’s fee payout being withheld, and no builder publishing a payment history either; the public record is silent in both directions.

Polymarket against the alternatives

We re-read Myriad’s and Limitless’s documents on 29 October 2026; the PRED row comes from our PRED review. The fee base is the difference that matters: Polymarket’s builder fee is a charge the trader sees, the other three come out of the venue’s own fee.

Program	What you earn	Attribution	Payment
Polymarket Builders	A fee you set, up to 1% taker / 0.5% maker of routed notional; weekly USDC reward with no published rate	Per signed order; nothing earned off-app	Daily for the previous UTC day, $0.10 minimum, pUSD
Myriad builder codes	Up to the market’s distributor fee, “typically 1%”, of eligible buys; the share is “at the team’s discretion”	Per buy carrying your code; sells and claims excluded	Monthly on the first Monday, $500 minimum, smaller balances carry over
Limitless referrals	10% to 40% of referred users’ taker fees, tier set by your own volume from $0 to $20 million	Permanent, first referrer wins	Daily USDC, $1 minimum, payable after the market resolves
PRED referrals	60% of trading fees for six months, then 20% to month 24	Link, 24-month window	$100 minimum

On $1,000 of eligible trades, a Polymarket builder at the 1% taker ceiling collects $10 from its own users; Myriad pays at most $10 on $1,000 of buys and possibly less; Limitless pays $10 to $40 for every $100 of taker fees, a share of the fee rather than of the notional. Limitless is the better fit for a publisher sending readers away, because the attribution is permanent and the ladder is public from $0; our Limitless affiliate program review has the tiers. Myriad is the closer technical relative, a builder code with a discretionary share and a $500 floor, read in our Myriad affiliate program review. Worm, which pays whoever creates a market rather than whoever brings a trader, is in our Worm review; the exchange fee-share model, where lifetime attribution is common, is in the exchange affiliate comparison. An app that routes Polymarket orders and wants paid traffic for itself faces the ad-platform rules in our guide to promoting a prediction market.

Verdict

6.5/10. What earns it: published ceilings, a daily payout from $0.10, attribution written into every order and visible on-chain, publicly queryable rates, a named contracting company and a dated Code of Conduct. Among the prediction markets in this series it publishes more about its mechanics than Myriad and as much as Limitless, and it is the only one where a builder prices its own work.

What holds it: nothing at all for a plain link below $10,000 of the referrer’s own volume, and then 30 days; a builder fee that is revocable “for any reason or no reason” and that users can avoid by trading through the free front door; a weekly reward that has been “subject to approval” for a year without a rate; forfeiture and clawback at the company’s discretion; three country lists that disagree, with the enforcement burden on the builder; Panama law and arbitration; and a brand rating of 1.3 that, while mostly about the US product, is the only public sentiment there is. It suits a team that already runs a trading interface and will manage eligibility country by country. Budget the weekly reward at zero, model a fee you can defend against a free alternative, and get the country list in writing before you launch.

FAQ

What is the Polymarket affiliate commission?

There is no fixed commission. A builder sets its own fee on the orders its app routes, up to 1% of notional on taker orders and 0.5% on maker orders, and the trader pays it. The retail referral program pays 10% of a direct referral’s net trading fees and 5% of an indirect one’s, for 30 days, to referrers with $10,000 of their own lifetime volume. The Perps referral program pays 20% of referred Perps traders’ fees weekly. A publisher offer hosted on Dub advertises 20% of referred users’ fees, with the paying company unnamed.

When does Polymarket pay builders?

Builder fees are paid daily, each payout covering the previous UTC day, to the wallet on the builder profile, with a $0.10 minimum per day and no stated hour. Perps builder fees are credited to the builder’s Perps account immediately. The weekly USDC reward runs in Sunday-to-Saturday epochs with no published transfer date, amount or claim procedure.

Is the Polymarket builder program legit?

It is documented on Polymarket’s own domains, attribution is recorded on-chain, the contracting company is named in the terms (Adventure One QSS, Inc., Panama law), and the leaderboard carries Gate, Jupiter, MetaMask, Bitget Wallet and KuCoin. What it is not: regulated, guaranteed or open to US-facing apps. The CFTC designation belongs to QCX LLC, Polymarket US, a separate platform. We found no complaint of a builder payout being withheld; the Trustpilot rating of 1.3 is about the retail product, mostly in the United States.

Does Polymarket offer lifetime affiliate attribution?

No. Builder attribution is per signed order, so a trader who leaves your app stops earning for you at once. Retail referral earnings end 30 days after the referral signs up or when the referral reaches the Platinum tier, whichever comes first. A Perps referral code binds to the referred account and cannot be changed, but the docs say the program’s “mechanics, attribution rules, invite limits, and other terms may change”.

What is the difference between the Polymarket referral program and the builder program?

The referral program is a link: it needs $10,000 of your own trading volume, pays 10% and 5% of net fees, and stops after 30 days. The builder program is an integration: your application signs orders with your code, charges a fee you choose within the published limits, and is paid daily. The weekly USDC reward and the grants sit on top of the builder program and are discretionary. The Perps referral is a third scheme with its own code, 20% of fees and weekly payment.

Can an app serve US users through Polymarket builder codes?

No. The United States is close-only on both the API and the frontend of the international platform, the terms bar US residents from trading, and the Code of Conduct makes the builder enforce the geoblock. Polymarket US is a separate CFTC-designated venue, QCX LLC, with its own rulebook; polymarket.com itself tells a visitor on a US connection to switch to polymarket.us.

adbench.io earns nothing from the programs discussed here. We do not use referral links.

Sources

The figures above come from these pages, published by the companies themselves unless noted. "Checked" is the date we last read each page.

1. Polymarket builder fees (docs) checked 29 Oct 2026
2. Polymarket builder program overview (docs) checked 29 Oct 2026
3. Polymarket builder tiers (docs) checked 29 Oct 2026
4. Polymarket builder portal, FAQ and leaderboard checked 29 Oct 2026
5. Polymarket Builder Code of Conduct (3 Aug 2026) checked 29 Oct 2026
6. Polymarket terms of use (11 Aug 2026) checked 29 Oct 2026
7. Polymarket referral program (28 May 2026) checked 29 Oct 2026
8. Polymarket taker rebate tiers checked 29 Oct 2026
9. Polymarket Perps referral program checked 29 Oct 2026
10. Polymarket Perps builder codes checked 29 Oct 2026
11. Polymarket geoblock list (developer docs) checked 29 Oct 2026
12. Polymarket help centre: geographic restrictions (14 Aug 2026) checked 29 Oct 2026
13. Polymarket changelog (CLOB V2, 28 Apr 2026) checked 29 Oct 2026
14. Polymarket pUSD concept page checked 29 Oct 2026
15. Polymarket order placement (builder code field) checked 29 Oct 2026
16. CFTC register entry 49571, QCX LLC d/b/a Polymarket US checked 29 Oct 2026
17. Polymarket publisher offer on Dub (20% revenue share) checked 29 Oct 2026
18. Trustpilot: polymarket.com (1.3, 656 reviews) checked 29 Oct 2026
19. Internet Archive: builders.polymarket.com, 2 Nov 2025 checked 29 Oct 2026
20. Myriad builder revenue sharing checked 29 Oct 2026
21. Limitless referral program checked 29 Oct 2026

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