Liquidity Rewards on Polymarket and Kalshi: How Makers Get Paid

A prediction market only works if there is something to trade against. Someone has to sit on a YES bid at 42¢ and a NO ask at 59¢ so the next person who wants to take a position can hit either side without slipping ten cents. The traders who post those resting orders are makers. The traders who hit them are takers. On a thin book, makers are doing the exchange a favor by quoting at all.

Polymarket and Kalshi both pay makers directly. Polymarket calls the program Daily Rewards. Kalshi calls them Incentive Programs. The shape is different on each platform, but the goal is the same: make it worth your while to keep both sides quoted at competitive prices, deep enough size, tight enough spread.

If you are running a market-making strategy, this is your floor. The reward is not the trade P&L. It is a payment for being available to be traded against. Your trade P&L is whatever your fills and your inventory do on top of that.

Each Polymarket reward market publishes three numbers a maker has to satisfy. The reward rate per day in USDC. The maximum spread allowed in cents. The minimum order size in shares. If your resting order sits inside the max spread and at or above the min size, you accrue a share of the daily pool while it stays there.

The pool is divided each day across qualifying orders by a competitive scoring formula. The closer your quote sits to the midpoint, and the more time it spends quoted at qualifying size, the larger your slice. A 50-share resting bid two ticks off mid earns less than a 200-share bid one tick off mid that has been live for the full day.

The market page on Polymarket shows the per-day reward, the max spread, the min size, and a small bar that indicates how much of the daily pool you are currently capturing. Most markets fall in the $1–$50/day range. Outliers (peace deal questions, election event markets in season) can pay $500/day or more.

Kalshi runs reward programs differently. Each program is bound to a specific market and a specific time window. The program publishes a fixed dollar pool, a target size in shares, and a discount factor in basis points that controls how aggressive your quote has to be relative to the midpoint.

The pool is paid out across the qualifying makers at the end of the window. A $1,000 program over 14 days does not pay $1,000/day to anyone. It pays the pool, divided across everyone who met the target-size and discount-factor requirements during that window. If you were the only maker hitting the target, you collect the full $1,000. If five makers were tied, you each collect $200.

Kalshi's biggest pools sit on weather, sports, and economic event series where the exchange wants intraday liquidity but the market itself only lives for a few hours. An 11-hour Boston temperature program with a $20 pool sounds tiny, but on a per-hour basis it pays roughly the same as a $44/day Polymarket program.

Polymarket quotes daily. Kalshi quotes per program. Comparing them by eye is awkward. The 0xinsider rewards explorer normalizes everything to a per-day equivalent on the backend before rendering.

For Polymarket, the per-day number is just the published rate. For Kalshi, it is the pool divided by the program window in days. A $20 pool over an 11-hour window surfaces as roughly $44/day. A $1,000 pool over 14 days surfaces as roughly $71/day. The expanded row on each entry shows the original program total and window length so the source numbers stay visible.

This is the apples-to-apples comparison. It is not a guarantee of what one trader takes home. The Kalshi number assumes you capture the full pool, which only happens if you are the sole qualifying maker. With three makers competing, you take a third. The number tells you how much capital is in play; your share depends on how many other makers are chasing it.

Cost of capital is first. Reward eligibility requires resting orders, and resting orders tie up capital that could be earning yield somewhere else. A 200-share bid at 42¢ commits $84 of USDC for the duration. If the program pays $5/day and the market is open for ten days, the reward is $50 against $84 of locked capital. That is a real return, but it is not free.

Inventory risk is next. The whole point of resting orders is that they get filled. If your YES bid at 42¢ fills and the market drifts to 35¢ before you can re-quote, the seven-cent move costs you $14 on a 200-share fill. The program reward did not save you from a directional miss. Most maker programs assume you have a way to hedge or unwind inventory, not that you are happy to be long whatever the order book gives you.

Fee changes happen too. Polymarket adjusted maker rebates and taker fees in March 2026, which moved the effective per-day return on several categories overnight. Kalshi rotates the markets in its incentive lineup weekly. The reward you see today is the reward today; tomorrow's number is independent.

The honest mental model is this: the reward is the floor on a market-making strategy that works, not the strategy itself. If you cannot hold inventory or cannot re-quote inside the max spread, the reward will not bail you out.

The page at 0xinsider.com/liquidity-rewards lists every active reward program across both platforms in a single feed. Each row shows the per-day equivalent, the platform, the market, the eligibility line (min size, max spread, or discount factor), the live yes/no prices, and how long until the program window ends.

Sort by Top reward to find the highest-paying programs. Sort by Ending soon for programs about to expire (useful if you want to stack a final-day position into the pool). Sort by Most traded for programs on markets with real flow, where reward eligibility is also where actual trade P&L lives.

Click any row to expand it. The detail view shows the eligibility numbers, the current top-of-book, and the program window. For Kalshi rows, the original program pool and the window in days are both visible alongside the normalized per-day number, so you can sanity-check the math.

The feed refreshes once a minute. Reward programs themselves do not change minute-to-minute, but market prices and program countdowns do. Use the rewards explorer as a screening tool, then verify the live numbers on the platform itself before you commit capital.