Polymarket API 101: Your First Python Script to Fetch Live Odds

Polymarket is one of the leading platforms for real-time prediction markets. Whether you’re tracking political events, sports, or global happenings, Polymarket allows users to bet on outcomes and see market odds evolve in real time. For developers and data enthusiasts, Polymarket also provides an API that makes it easy to fetch live odds and integrate them into your own applications. In this guide, we’ll walk you through your first Python script to fetch live odds from the Polymarket API.

Why Use the Polymarket API?

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are tools that allow software applications to communicate with each other. Polymarket’s API provides a way to access live data from their markets programmatically. This is useful for building dashboards, performing data analysis, or even creating your own trading bots. With Python, one of the most popular programming languages for data work, you can quickly retrieve and manipulate this data.

Setting Up Your Python Environment

Before you begin, ensure you have Python installed on your computer. You will also need the requests library, which allows you to make HTTP requests to APIs.

This script does the following:

1. Connects to the Polymarket API – The requests.get function sends a request to the API endpoint.
2. Checks the response – HTTP status code 200 means the request was successful.
3. Parses the JSON data – response.json() converts the JSON response into a Python dictionary.
4. Prints market information – The script loops through the first 5 markets and displays the odds for each outcome.

Understanding the Data

Polymarket returns market data in JSON format. Each market includes details like:

• Question: The prediction topic (e.g., “Who will win the next election?”).
• Outcomes: The possible results and their current odds.
• Volume and liquidity: Optional fields for deeper market analysis.

With this information, you can start building your own data dashboards, alerts, or even simple trading models.

Next Steps

Once you’re comfortable fetching live odds, you can explore more advanced features of the Polymarket API:

• Filter markets by category or status.
• Track historical market data for analysis.
• Combine with visualization libraries like Matplotlib or Plotly to create interactive dashboards.

APIs open up endless possibilities for developers, and Polymarket is a great playground for experimenting with real-time prediction data.