How Often Polymarket Market and Smart Money Data Refreshes
PolyLab rebuilds its Polymarket market snapshot every hour and refreshes holder positions hourly with separate bounded wallet-P/L batches. Because those are separate cycles, scanner rows can pair fresh prices with older holder data, and both can diverge from the live Polymarket interface.
Any third-party Polymarket tool reads the venue through periodic API calls rather than a live order book feed, so there is always a lag between what it shows and what Polymarket shows. This page states PolyLab's exact cadence and the specific conditions under which the two diverge most.
Real refresh cadence
Market snapshots refresh every hour.
Holder positions refresh hourly for active/open markets with at least $10,000 volume and $10,000 liquidity. Holder collection and forward history capture continue past kickoff while the market remains in the active snapshot and meets the volume and liquidity thresholds. Missed historical observations are not reconstructed. A bounded missing-holder catch-up follows each successful market scrape; eligible users can also request missing holders by opening a market detail.
Wallet P/L runs in bounded batches every 15 minutes, reusing observations for 24 hours. Queueing and upstream failures can make individual observations older. These schedules are targets, not guarantees for every market or wallet.
Those are separate refresh layers. The scanner can therefore show fresh market rows paired with older holder-based enrichment.
Hourly snapshot behavior
The market scraper rebuilds the active outcome snapshot and tag table on each run. PolyLab therefore behaves like a scanner over hourly snapshots rather than tick-level live execution.
Why numbers can differ from Polymarket
There are several legitimate reasons for mismatch:
- PolyLab may be showing the last completed hourly snapshot
- holder enrichment may reflect an earlier completed position refresh or older cached wallet P/L
- API snapshot quotes can differ from the current live order book
- categories and icons are resolved through event metadata and fallbacks
- holder sampling only covers the top sampled addresses, not every participant
Upstream API dependence
PolyLab depends on multiple Polymarket upstream services. If one service is slower, rate-limited, or structurally changed, parts of the scanner can drift from each other temporarily.
Snapshot consequences
Fast-moving markets
Near breaking news or close to expiry, the difference between an hourly snapshot and the live venue can be large.
Sparse metadata
If upstream event metadata is missing or changes shape, event_slug, icon, or category can fall back to less complete values.
Smart-money lag
The smart-money layer can legitimately lag market state because it depends on separate position and wallet-P/L calls.
Practical guidance
- Cross-check execution decisions on live Polymarket.
- Treat holder context as slower-moving than raw market fields.
- Expect the largest divergences near expiry and during rapid news cycles.