Leveraged Prediction Markets: Up to 10x on Polymarket

Leveraged prediction markets let traders control a position larger than their deposit by borrowing against it, turning a $10 stake into a $50 or $100 position on a real-world outcome. Amplifi is the permissionless prime brokerage for prediction markets that makes this possible on Polymarket, with up to 10x leverage, no signup, and no KYC.

Quick answer: A leveraged prediction market position on Amplifi is a normal prediction market trade (YES or NO shares on a real event) financed partly with borrowed funds. On Amplifi, you deposit USDC, choose up to 10x leverage, and the protocol borrows the rest from a lending pool. You hold real Polymarket shares. If the price moves your way, gains multiply. If it moves against you, losses multiply and the position can be liquidated.

Polymarket processed $80 billion over the last year, all of it at 1x: every dollar of exposure required a dollar of capital. Equities have margin accounts, crypto has perps, sports betting has parlays. Prediction markets had nothing, until a wave of leverage infrastructure arrived in 2025 and 2026.

This five-minute read covers the mechanics, costs, and liquidation model behind leveraged prediction markets on Amplifi.

What are leveraged prediction markets?

A prediction market lets you trade binary shares on a real-world outcome. A YES share on "Will the Fed hold rates in July?" costs the market's implied probability, say 84¢, and pays $1.00 if the event happens, $0.00 if it does not.

Leverage turns that binary share into a margin trade. The 84¢ outcome that pays 19%, pays 190% on equity when the trader takes a 10x leveraged position. While leverage increases the upside, it also introduces liquidation risk. The same position must be liquidated before 75.6¢, at which it starts accruing bad debt.

There are two approaches to leveraged prediction markets:

1. Credit model
2. Synthetic model

Credit model

The credit protocol for traders is called prime brokerage in traditional finance: it extends credit to traders against their collateral. In TradFi, credit is facilitated by a Master Loan Agreement, which depends on creditworthiness of the trader. It requires KYC and it is permissioned. In permissionless finance, collateral based lending has been pioneered by Aave. While Aave only offers over-collateralized loans, a trader can loop their position (provide ETH as collateral, borrow USDC, trade USDC for ETH, provide more ETH collateral and loop) to create a leveraged position. Gondor, which is a leveraged prediction market product, works in this exact same way. Looping, however, is slow and capital-inefficient: it requires multiple transactions, which takes time and introduces exposure to price movements.

Amplifi, which is built on t1's permissionless credit protocol, enables fast, single-click leverage that uses an under-collateralized lending primitive. Amplifi creates a TEE-controlled margin account for each trader. The margin account holds the user collateral and borrows funds from lenders to fund the leveraged position. The position is executed on Polymarket CLOB in a single order and Polymarket share tokens are sent to the margin account. The margin account's logic is attested on-chain and verifiable by anyone. It enforces two things:

1. spending restrictions, so that the trader cannot run away with borrowed funds
2. liquidation policy, so that the lenders are not left with worthless share tokens and can be made whole

TEE attestation guarantees that the attested code is the code that actually runs. That is why lending pools can extend credit to any wallet that connects, no KYC, no legal agreements. The margin account, not the borrower's reputation, protects the lender.

Synthetic model

The synthetic model lists its own perp-style contract that tracks a prediction market's probability, runs its own orderbook or AMM for it, and offers leverage against that book. This approach does not touch the underlying market at all and traders never hold the real venue's shares. The counterparty is the other side of the synthetic book, and a funding rate keeps the contract price anchored to the underlying market.

The model has real advantages: leverage caps can go higher (some platforms offer 20x), and the platform can list contracts on markets it has no integration with. But it inherits a major structural problem, the liquidity cold start: every listed market needs its own market makers on both sides, while the credit model rides the underlying venue's existing depth from day one.

Amplifi chose the credit model: real shares, the venue's own liquidity, and jump risk managed by market curation and a depth-aware risk engine rather than socialized across traders.

How does leverage work on Amplifi?

Here is the complete flow on Amplifi, with real numbers:

1. You deposit $10 USDC as margin.
2. You select 5x leverage on a market priced at 50¢.
3. The protocol borrows $40 from a lending pool.
4. Your margin account buys 100 YES shares at 50¢, a $50 position.
5. The price rises to 60¢. Your shares are worth $60. After repaying the $40 loan, your equity is $20: a 100% return on your $10 margin. The same move at 1x would have returned 20%.
6. Or the price falls toward your liquidation price. The protocol sells your shares, repays the $40 loan plus interest, and returns whatever equity remains.

Two details matter more than the arithmetic.

You hold real shares. A leveraged position is actual Polymarket conditional tokens in your margin account, not a synthetic contract or a perp. Winning shares redeem at $1.00 on-chain, the loan is repaid from proceeds, and the rest is yours.

The math is symmetric. At 5x, a 10% price move is a 50% swing on your margin, in either direction. Leverage does not improve your odds; it compresses the price range in which you stay solvent.

What can you trade with leverage?

As of July 2026, leverage on Amplifi spans every major Polymarket category. A snapshot of live markets and their caps:

The pattern: deep, liquid markets carry the highest caps. Crypto strike markets ("BTC above $64K / $66K / $68K…") are the flagship case: a daily ladder of binary options around spot with deep books and unambiguous resolution.

What is liquidation, and how does it work?

Every leveraged position has a liquidation price. If the market trades through it, the protocol closes your position, sells the shares, repays the loan, and returns what is left. For a liquidation to happen, both the last traded price and the best bid must be lower than the liquidation price. This is not punitive. It is the mechanism that lets lenders extend credit to anonymous wallets in the first place. The honest version of this section requires real numbers, so here is a live one.

A worked example from a real market

Take a high-conviction favorite: "Bitcoin above $64,000 on July 23?", trading around 90¢. Short-duration, deep-book markets like daily BTC strike markets run a 20% liquidation threshold: liquidation triggers when your projected remaining equity falls to roughly 20% of your original margin.

At 10x: $10 margin opens a $100 position, 111 shares at 90¢, $90 borrowed. Your equity is 111 × price − $90. Liquidation triggers near 83¢, when projected equity approaches $2. A 7¢ move against you, about 8% of the share price, ends the position.

At 5x on the same market: $10 margin, $50 position, 55.6 shares, $40 borrowed. Liquidation sits near 76¢, a 16% adverse move.

Standard markets run the more conservative default 30% threshold. Tighter thresholds on short-duration markets let you ride deeper drawdowns, in exchange for keeping less when the engine steps in.

Your liquidation price moves

The liquidation price is dynamic. It's recalculated continuously from accrued interest, orderbook depth, and exit fees. Amplifi requires a certain depth between the liquidation price and the bad debt price, which is called the in-flight depth requirement. Due to this requirement, liquidation price can be increased.

Buy-side depth on Polymarket moves erratically, and market makers sometimes pull their quotes. This phenomenon is called the jump-risk. To account for this, the risk engine introduces a market specific delay. These conditions must hold for a given time period for liquidations to trigger.

Amplifi liquidates while the book can still absorb the sale, protecting the lending pool that makes your leverage exist.

Per-position liquidation

Each position is liquidated independently. There is no cross-margin health factor and Amplifi never force-closes a position to cover a loss. This means Amplifi does not enforce AutoDeLeverage (ADL). Note that if a liquidation doesn't fully repay the loan, the shortfall is first covered by available cash in your account before it reaches the lending pool. Positions are independent, but not fully isolated from your account balance.

How is this different from perps, sports betting, and options?

Perps run forever with funding rates and ADL; leveraged prediction positions expire at resolution and, on Amplifi, are never ADL'd.

Sportsbooks are your counterparty, with their margin built into the odds; prediction markets are peer-to-peer orderbooks you can exit any time before resolution.

Options are the closest cousin: a YES share behaves like a binary call, and leverage is buying it on margin.

We cover each comparison in depth in dedicated guides (linked as they publish).

Winning user strategies

Most winning Amplifi users trade deep markets, with high entry price and short time to resolution. Polymarket traders call high-priced (over 90¢), short-duration (under 72 hours) positions "bonds." Leverage is a great tool for Polymarket bond markets.

The most popular markets on Amplifi are daily Bitcoin strike price markets, Elon Musk tweet markets and geopolitics markets. The volume weighted average entry price in all of these markets is above 95¢, and all of them have less than 5 days to resolution.

Leverage is a capital efficiency tool and does not make sense when you would be levering a coin flip near 50¢ in a thin book, holding for months while interest compounds, or sizing up because you are down. At 10x, an 8% adverse move can end the position.

FAQ

Can you trade Polymarket with leverage?

Yes. Polymarket itself does not offer leverage, but Amplifi adds up to 10x on live Polymarket markets through a TEE-controlled margin account. You hold real Polymarket shares, and no account or KYC is required.

Can you get liquidated on Polymarket?

Not on Polymarket itself, where positions are fully collateralized. On a leveraged Amplifi position, yes: crossing your liquidation price closes the position automatically, repays the loan, and returns remaining equity.

How much leverage can you get on Amplifi?

Depending on market category, market's entry price, liquidity, and duration, leverage on Amplifi can go up to 10x.

What does it cost to trade prediction markets with leverage?

On Amplifi: no platform trading fee, Polymarket's own taker fee (peaks near 50¢ shares, zero on some markets), and interest on the borrowed USDC while the position is open. Withdrawals cost a flat $0.20.

Is leveraged prediction market trading safe?

No form of leverage is safe. Losses multiply exactly as fast as gains, and positions can be liquidated. What a well-built platform provides is bounded, transparent risk: per-position liquidation, a visible liquidation price, and no ADL. Never deposit more than you can afford to lose.

What is jump risk in prediction markets?

Jump risk is the chance a binary market gaps in one move, say 95¢ to 5¢ on a single headline, leaving no window to liquidate. It is why Polymarket and Kalshi do not offer leverage natively: research from Messari shows leverage only works on markets whose prices move continuously enough to liquidate.

How does Amplifi handle jump risk?

Market curation and risk parameters. Amplifi only enables leverage on deep, liquid markets validated by backtesting, and skips thin flash-event markets where prices gap. Each market's leverage caps, liquidation threshold, and interest curve are calibrated so lending pools stay profitable: interest income plus liquidation penalties are designed to exceed bad-debt losses from jumps.

Do I need an account to use Amplifi?

No. Connect a wallet, deposit USDC (minimum $2), and trade. There is no signup, no KYC, and no waiting period.

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By Can Kisagun, CEO of t1 Labs. Amplifi is the permissionless prime brokerage for prediction markets, built on t1's permissionless credit infrastructure. t1 Labs is backed by a16z CSX. Nothing here is financial advice; leveraged trading can result in loss of your deposit.