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GETTING STARTED

The basics

New to crypto or prediction markets? Start here. This page explains the everyday ideas the rest of the docs build on — no prior knowledge assumed.

Prediction markets & Polymarket

A prediction market lets people bet on the outcome of a real-world question — an election, a sports result, "will this happen by Friday?" Polymarket is the largest such market. Instead of traditional odds, you buy shares in an outcome.

PREDICTION MARKET"Will event X happen by Friday?"YES63¢ per share= 63% implied oddsNO37¢ per share= 37% implied oddseach winning share settles to $1.00 · each losing share to $0.00
A prediction market turns a question into shares. The price of a YES share is the market's estimate of the odds. Each share pays out $1 if its outcome is right and $0 if it's wrong — so buying YES at 63¢ and being right returns 37¢ of profit.

The price of a share is the market's estimate of the odds: a YES share at 63¢ means the crowd thinks the event is about 63% likely. If you're right, every share you hold settles to $1.00; if you're wrong, it's worth $0. Buy low on an outcome you believe in, and the gap between what you paid and $1 is your profit.

Wallets, addresses & USDC

Wallet
Your crypto account — software like MetaMask that holds your keys. You sign with it to approve actions, the way you'd sign a cheque.
Address
Your wallet's public ID (a string like 0x1a2b…). Anyone can look up everything an address has ever done — that public visibility is exactly the privacy problem PolyShield solves.
USDC
A stablecoin: a digital dollar that always aims to be worth $1. It's the only money PolyShield takes in and pays out.

"On-chain" — and why it's all public

A blockchain like Polygon is a shared public ledger. Every transaction is recorded permanently and visibly, tagged with the address that made it. That transparency is great for trust — but it means a normal Polymarket bet is forever linked to your wallet for anyone to see. PolyShield keeps the transparency (everything is still verifiable on-chain) while hiding the one link that matters: which bet is yours.

Gas

Every on-chain action costs a small network fee called gas, paid in the chain's native token. With PolyShield you don't pay gas on your bets at all — the proof relay submits them and covers the gas for you (which is also what keeps your wallet off the transaction). The only time your wallet itself acts on-chain is the initial deposit.

Where PolyShield fits
Put simply: you deposit USDC, bet on Polymarket through a shared account so no one can tell the bet is yours, and withdraw your winnings back to your own wallet — with cryptography, not trust, keeping you private the whole way.