To reconstruct a Polymarket bot incident, preserve the bot’s local evidence, then reconcile authenticated order records with account trade records and real-time user-order events. An order is not the same thing as an executed trade: order reads help establish order state, while account trade reads are the evidence to inspect for fills. The platform records can help show what happened on the account; your bot’s logs are needed to explain what it intended, sent, received, retried, and saved.
Preserve evidence before restarting or cleaning up
Before restarting the process, rotating logs, or deleting temporary files, copy the evidence that may be relevant into a time-stamped incident folder. Keep originals unchanged and work from copies. Record the source of each file and any known clock settings or offsets so timestamps from different systems can later be compared.
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- Bot logs, including decision, request, response, retry, and persistence records if available.
- Raw REST responses and raw WebSocket messages, not only dashboards or normalized summaries.
- Deployment, process restart, and configuration records, along with the software and API-client versions in use.
- Relevant account, market condition, token, and order identifiers.
This is prudent incident-handling practice, not a Polymarket-prescribed logging procedure. Do not assume a particular log or message exists unless you can verify it.
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Establish which account and time window you are investigating
Write down the account or signer identity, the credential type used by the bot, the approximate incident window in UTC, and any known market condition IDs, token IDs, or order IDs. If an API read appears empty, check identity and access scope before treating that absence as proof that no order existed.
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Polymarket’s order-management documentation describes Session Key access as limited to orders and trades associated with those keys; it also says Deposit Wallet Owners cannot fetch orders from authorized Session Keys. A query made with the wrong identity or scope may therefore fail to show the records you expect.
Reconcile the order separately from its executions
Check a known order ID
Use authenticated order lookup for an order ID found in the bot’s logs. The response can establish the order’s recorded state and provide fields such as status, side, price, original size, matched size, outcome, associated trades, and creation time. Preserve the raw response alongside any interpretation you make; a current snapshot does not by itself explain the bot’s earlier decisions or every intermediate state.
List orders that may still be resting
Use the open-orders listing to look for orders that remain on the book, applying the documented filters for token, condition or market, or order ID where appropriate. Compare the returned IDs with local requests and responses. An order still appearing open is different evidence from a completed execution, and an order’s matched-size field is not a substitute for reviewing the associated trade records.
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Retrieve account trades for the relevant time window and, where useful, market or token. Compare the order’s matched size and associated trade IDs with the trade records. Documented trade fields include trade ID, condition ID, token ID, taker order ID, maker-order details, side, price, size, status, transaction hash, matched time, and update time.
Use the identifiers to join the evidence rather than relying on a single status label: compare the order ID, associated trade IDs, taker order ID, maker-order references, and transaction hash where present. Take care not to count an execution twice when the same activity is represented through both sides or related order references. The order-management records describe orders and trades as distinct data, so keep them distinct in your timeline and any totals.
Build a UTC timeline from separate evidence streams
Make one timeline and retain the original timestamp values alongside normalized UTC timestamps. For each entry, record its evidence source and the identifiers that connect it to other entries. A useful format is:
| Timestamp (UTC) | Evidence source | Order or trade ID | Market or token | Action or state | Size or price | Confidence or limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Normalized time; retain original value | Bot log, API response, user stream, market stream, account trade, or transaction reference | Exact ID if present | Condition or token ID if present | Intent, request, response, event, or recorded state | As recorded | What this record establishes and what it does not |
Keep the evidence types separate when interpreting the sequence:
- Bot logs can show the strategy’s intent, local requests, retries, software state, and persistence, to the extent the operator recorded them.
- Authenticated order reads help identify current order state and matched-size information.
- Account trade reads provide execution records to compare against the order.
- Real-time user-order updates are a live account-event stream for monitoring and comparison; see Polymarket’s user-channel documentation.
- Market-data messages provide market context, not account execution evidence; see Polymarket’s market-channel documentation.
A price movement or market-data message may help explain the surrounding conditions, but it does not prove that your order filled. Corroborate apparent fills with account trade records and the relevant identifiers.
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Interpret mismatches without guessing at the cause
If the bot’s log and the account view disagree, isolate what each source actually establishes. For example, a local “sent” entry can establish that the software logged an attempted request, but not that the exchange accepted it. A user-stream event can add timing context, while an authenticated order read or account trade record can help verify account-side state. Missing logs, incomplete time coverage, incorrect account scope, or a process restart may leave parts of the sequence unresolved; they do not establish a specific failure mode on their own.
Polymarket describes outcome shares as priced between $0.00 and $1.00 USDC and each YES/NO pair as fully collateralized by $1.00 USDC in its FAQ. These platform mechanics do not identify your account’s side, outcome, size, or execution. Use the order and trade records for those incident-specific facts.
State what the available records can and cannot establish
Close the incident record with a bounded finding: list the orders and trades you could match, the evidence sources and time window used, and any gaps. If records are missing, identify which ones and why their absence matters. A current order snapshot and retrieved trade list may support reconciliation, but Polymarket’s reviewed documentation does not promise that those records alone reproduce every transient bot event or explain why a strategy acted. Without the affected bot logs, identifiers, account scope, and a usable time window, the cause of an individual incident cannot be determined from the platform records alone.
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API routes, schemas, credential behavior, and live-feed details can change. Consult the current official documentation when implementing or adapting this workflow.
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