Tech zone · method, data, architecture
This is the open back room: how every TickTape verdict is computed, the recorded data it runs on, the machine surfaces agents read, and what the architecture honestly is. Nothing here is marketing — every method on this page is the one the live API executes.
Methodology
Order verdicts (OK / CAUTION / VETO) and wallet verdicts (COPY / WATCH / VETO) come out of the same discipline: deterministic computation on recorded or live data, fees charged explicitly, and no rating that has not survived data it was not selected on.
Order verdicts are computed from the live CLOB book at request time: expected VWAP, slippage against your thresholds, order size versus visible depth, book age. Same inputs, same verdict, every time — no model weights, nothing to drift, nothing to hallucinate. The only uncertainty is the book changing between check and fill.
Wallet verdicts simulate a realistic copier, not a fantasy one: a fixed $5 stake at the wallet's first entry per market, a +2c slippage floor, held to resolution. Crypto up/down window markets are excluded. Exact size-and-delay replay is not live — and we say so wherever the number appears.
Every simulated fill pays Polymarket's published 2026 taker fee: fee per share = rate × p × (1−p). The curve peaks at mid prices — exactly where most copy entries cluster — so a wallet that looks profitable before fees can be a loser after them. Verdicts are always fee-inclusive.
COPY is granted only to a wallet whose edge survived a second, earlier month it was not selected on. In-sample-only performance caps at WATCH, no matter how good the number is. This is the rule that kills survivorship bias — and it is why the leaderboard is short.
// the method string every wallet verdict ships with — verbatim from the API "method": "first-entry mirror, $5/trade, 2c slippage, explicit 2026 taker fees" // and the order-verdict method from preflight_trade "method": "deterministic arithmetic on the live CLOB book + 2026 taker-fee schedule"
The rules applied to the window 2026-06-12 to 2026-07-11. Of 3 survivors, 1 is rated COPY and 2 WATCH. The 17 wallets that would have lost a copier money — including the two biggest by volume — are what the vetoes are for.
The evidence layer
A verdict is only as good as the record it is computed from. TickTape records its own, independently from public exchange feeds:
Every Polymarket fill of 5+ shares, with trader identity, recorded continuously since December 30, 2025 — all market categories since mid-January 2026 — a history that cannot be reconstructed from Polymarket's live API. This is the layer that makes copyability computable at all.
Full-depth books for crypto 15-minute windows since January 2026; NBA/NHL/NFL game markets January to June 2026 (off-season since, resuming in autumn); and, since July 2026, the top-200 Polymarket markets by volume across all categories. preflight_trade reads the live CLOB book at request time — the archive backs research, calibration of the simulation parameters, and the copy/leaderboard products.
The tape lost 5 days in March 2026 (2026-03-06 to 2026-03-10, inclusive) to a disk incident. It is marked in the coverage timeline and in per-file manifests — we document what exists instead of pretending it is complete.
Full documentation — coverage timeline, a sample raw record, and an honest comparison with every other Polymarket data vendor including the free one — lives on Data & the Archive. The raw files are not for sale; the data is consumed as verdicts.
Coverage
Coverage claims are where data vendors round up. These are the exact rules, the same ones the live API applies. Machine-readable dataset manifest — start dates and known gaps: /coverage.json.
A wallet gets a precomputed copyability profile once it has 10 or more first entries in the rolling 90-day window of the tape — tens of thousands of wallets qualify after each nightly run and answer sub-second. Any other wallet returns HTTP 202 QUEUED, free of charge, and — if it has tape activity — is typically ready in minutes (the response's retry_after_seconds tells you when to retry; worst case about an hour); a wallet below the floor gets an explicit NO_COVERAGE profile rather than a made-up verdict.
Not all of them — precisely these: 15-minute crypto up/down markets (BTC/ETH/SOL/XRP, since mid-January 2026), NBA/NHL/NFL game markets, and the top-200 Polymarket markets by volume across all categories (since July 11, 2026). Every other market has the trade tape only — no order-book archive.
Nightly full recompute starts at ~03:30 UTC; profiles and the leaderboard are fresh at the edge by ~04:30 UTC daily. An hourly delta run picks up new activity and QUEUED wallets in between. Live freshness — data_through, wallets covered, next recompute — is always readable at /status.json.
Machine surfaces
TickTape is machine-first: every spec, price and payment term is published at a stable path an agent can fetch. The human pages you are reading are rendered from the same facts.
| Surface | What it is |
|---|---|
| /llms.txt | canonical machine spec — tools, payment terms, payTo address, operator safety rules; the file agents should verify payments against |
| /agent.json | compact machine manifest |
| /openapi.json | OpenAPI 3.1 schema for the four paid tools |
| /status.json | free live status — data_through, wallets covered, engine version, next nightly recompute |
| /coverage.json | static coverage manifest — datasets, start dates, known gaps; a summary of the server-side per-file manifests |
| /auth.md | authentication = payment: the x402 flows (v2 and v1), credits, bearer-token hygiene |
| /pricing.md | machine-readable rate card (human version: /pricing) |
| POST /mcp | native MCP server, streamable-http — all four tools plus a credits balance check; server card at /.well-known/mcp/server-card.json |
| /discovery/resources | x402 resource discovery for this origin |
How to call the tools, the 402 payment trace and the copy-paste agent setup live on the agent docs.
Architecture, honestly
Dedicated collectors have been writing the trade tape since December 2025 and the order-book archive since January 2026. They run around the clock; when one fails, the gap goes into the manifest, not under the rug.
Wallet profiles are recomputed nightly over a rolling 90-day window on the compute server; an hourly engine picks up QUEUED wallets. The edge serves the results sub-second. preflight_trade is the exception — it reads the live book at request time.
Paid calls settle in USDC on Base via x402, and every paid response links its Basescan receipt. Per-call settlement costs 2–5 seconds — that is the chain, not our stack, and we publish it instead of hiding it. Credits skip settlement entirely.
Honesty policy
We never show a number we did not compute; corrections are published visibly.
Every verdict ships with its reasons, its thresholds and its method string. Roadmap items are labeled roadmap. If you find an error anywhere on this site, tell us at hello@ticktape.cc — the fix will be visible, not silent.
The data documentation shows the raw layer the verdicts are computed from — including where to get Polymarket data that is not ours. The agent docs show the four calls and the full 402 payment trace.
The data behind the verdicts Agent docs