RESEARCH / 001
What changed in the PolyBolt BTC price feed on October 7
Prepared October 12, 2026, from the October 11 audit and its supporting comparison files.
In the audited BTC files, PolyBolt's price.crypto feed with provider=chainlink first matched RTDS Chainlink spot at 2026-10-07 14:55:00 UTC. Before this boundary, it matched the RTDS 30-second Chainlink TWAP exactly.
This is the first observed source timestamp with the new price semantics. It is not a confirmed deployment timestamp. The finding applies to the supplied BTC files and connection, without establishing what happened for other symbols or connections.
Comparison method
The audit compared six overlapping UTC days, October 3 through October 8. Records were paired on the exact source_ts_ms. For duplicate source timestamps within a feed, the last received record was retained. Unmatched timestamps were excluded from the denominator. No interpolation or nearest-neighbor matching was used.
Prices were compared as exact decimal values. RTDS full_accuracy_value integers were divided by 10**18; Bolt values were interpreted directly as decimal USD prices.
| Period | Exact match to RTDS TWAP30 | Exact match to RTDS spot |
|---|---|---|
| October 3 | 84,793 / 84,793 | 0 / 84,784 |
| October 4 | 84,738 / 84,738 | 0 / 84,726 |
| October 5 | 84,631 / 84,631 | 0 / 84,614 |
| October 6 | 83,974 / 83,974 | 0 / 83,979 |
| October 7 before 14:55:00 UTC | 52,005 / 52,005 | 0 / 52,004 |
| October 7 from 14:55:00 UTC | 0 / 31,915 | 31,899 / 31,899 |
| October 8 | 0 / 84,512 | 84,511 / 84,511 |
Denominators differ because each pair has its own set of shared timestamps. Before the boundary, 390,141 paired observations matched TWAP30 exactly. After the boundary, 116,410 paired observations matched spot exactly. The Bolt 60-second TWAP matched RTDS TWAP60 at all 506,447 shared timestamps across the six days.
The boundary
At 14:54:57 UTC, Bolt returned 82964.670816563404734464, equal to RTDS TWAP30. RTDS spot was 82989.598887755.
The Bolt files have no records at 14:54:58 or 14:54:59. At 14:55:00, Bolt returned 82993.49170763, equal to RTDS spot; RTDS TWAP30 was 82965.948554308357193728.
The observable transition interval is therefore (14:54:57, 14:55:00] UTC. The first new record arrived at 14:55:02.128 UTC, 2.128 seconds after its source timestamp.
The connection ID stayed unchanged. Consecutive sequence numbers were 92183 and 92184, with seq_gap=0 and dropped=0. Together with the exact price matches, this strongly suggests that the price content changed within an existing connection. Continuous sequence numbers do not recover the two missing seconds.
Interpreting historical files
chainlink_spot is a local collector label assigned from the channel. provider=chainlink identifies a selected vendor. Neither label independently establishes the historical price calculation.
The current Live Data documentation describes provider selection and vendor identification, and specifies a 60-second window for TWAP. The RTDS migration documentation provides the current interface mapping. This historical finding comes from saved observations; SDK or documentation dates do not establish a server deployment time.
For price-response studies, separate the two audited periods and preserve the raw prices and channel labels. Source-time alignment answers which prices correspond. A strategy simulation must use receive-time availability and only join observations that had already arrived.
RTDS comparisons for October 9 and 10 were not part of this audit. The files also do not establish when the earlier TWAP30 behavior began. The accompanying CSVs contain daily statistics, boundary-period statistics, and a 21-second boundary extract.
Historical files and updates are available in the Polymarket data channel. Predict.fun order books are published in a separate channel.
Statistics are from the 11 October 2026 audit. The evidence ZIP includes the report, comparison CSVs and method notes.