RTDS
Real-Time Data Streams — Chainlink's low-latency oracle product used by Polymarket to resolve short-duration crypto binary markets.
Definition
RTDS (Real-Time Data Streams) is Chainlink's sub-second oracle product designed for applications requiring high-frequency, low-latency price data. It aggregates prices from multiple major exchanges, applies outlier filtering, and publishes signed price reports that can be verified on-chain. Polymarket uses RTDS to resolve 5-minute and 15-minute crypto binary markets.
In practice
At the close of a 5-minute BTC binary market, the Polymarket resolver reads the Chainlink RTDS price tick for the exact end timestamp. This aggregated price — typically a median of Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, and others — determines whether YES or NO wins. Bot strategies that use only Binance as a signal source can win on the Binance price but lose on the RTDS aggregation if the exchanges are split. This is why poly5m-v4 uses a multi-exchange median to align its signal with how the oracle actually resolves. See the full entry under chainlink-rtds.