Building a Low-Latency Polymarket Bot for Earnings Markets: A Real-World Attempt (Lessons & Technical Breakdown)

Short summary

Two developers attempted to build a faster earnings-market sniping bot on Polymarket to compete with an existing bot extracting $32k in profits, discovering that network latency dominates code optimization far more than algorithm sophistication. Data-feed speed is the critical bottleneck—even paid feeds at 500ms were too slow. They recommend Rust, AWS colocation, and custom clients, but conclude beating faster competitors requires expensive dedicated feeds.

• •Network latency, not code speed, is the dominant factor in high-frequency trading bot success
• •Data-feed speed is the bottleneck—500ms paid feeds were still too slow against faster competitors
• •Viable edge requires expensive infrastructure (Rust, AWS colocation, custom clients) or dedicated feeds most teams can't access

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