What is polymarket-trading-bot?

This is a Node.js trading bot for Polymarket, a prediction market platform where people bet on the outcomes of real-world events using cryptocurrency. The bot focuses specifically on short-duration Bitcoin price direction markets: five-minute windows where traders bet on whether Bitcoin will go up or down. The core strategy is arbitrage on Polymarket's order book. Arbitrage means finding situations where the combined price of betting on both outcomes is less than the total payout, so a profit is guaranteed if both sides of a trade can be filled at the right prices. The bot posts buy orders at multiple price levels on both the "up" and "down" sides of each market, monitors the order book through a live connection, and executes when the prices align. After positions are matched and the market resolves, the bot handles merging and redeeming positions back into USDC, which is a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency used on the platform. A second feature is copy trading: the bot can watch a specific wallet address and mirror its trades automatically, either by polling for new activity at a set interval or by running a dedicated copy-trading process alongside the main arbitrage loop. To run it, you need a Polymarket account with a proxy wallet, a private key for a Polygon blockchain wallet (the network Polymarket runs on), USDC tokens for trading, and MATIC tokens to pay transaction fees. Configuration is done through environment variables covering spend limits, order sizes, loss circuit breakers, and copy trading settings. The project includes several built-in risk controls: caps on how much is spent per market, limits on individual order sizes, an hourly loss ceiling that halts trading if exceeded, and a flag to stop buying trades close to market close. The README strongly recommends starting with small position sizes and testing the copy trading feature in dry-run mode before committing real funds. All trades and errors are logged to a file and to the console for monitoring and debugging.