In August 2026, Polymarket updated the Chainlink BTC/USD price feed for the 5 minute market such that it is no longer the real-time price feed but rather a Time-weighted Average Price (TWAP) calculated from the previous 60 seconds of data. The reason was that market manipulators were able to move the real-time BTC price in the last seconds of the market in order to manipulate the Polymarket 5 minute markets. By shifting the feed to the TWAP 60 this makes it more difficult to manipulate the market because the resolution price (the market end price) is based on an average of the last 60 seconds of the market so manipulators would have to use a lot of capital to move the price over 60 seconds.
- Spot price - this is the previous Chainlink oracle BTC/USD price.
- TWAP 60 - this is the new Chainlink feed used in the 5 minute market. It is essentially just a 60 second look-back overlay on top of the Chainlink spot feed.
The regular Chainlink BTC/USD data stream is an aggregated price across different platforms and networks and is almost near real-time ie. it is an aggregated price (not sure how Chainlink determines a single price from all sources) across the networks at specific points in time.
By contrast, the Time-Weighted Average Price (TWAP) is an average price calculated by taking every price over the last 60 seconds and dividing it by the number of observations. See BTC / USD - TWAP: 60s. So the TWAP price is not the price of BTC 60 seconds ago, it is the average price over the last 60 seconds.
This shall obviously have implications for any trading bots.
The following diagram describes how the market open and close prices are calculated.
