Skip to content

Core Concepts

Polystrike is an oracle intelligence layer for Polymarket’s Elon Musk tweet count markets. This page explains the core problem and how Polystrike gives you an information edge.

Polymarket shows traders two tweet counters:

  • XTracker (the settlement oracle): Updates every ~5 minutes. This is the number that actually determines who wins and loses.
  • UI Counter: Displayed on the Polymarket trading interface. Frequently freezes or lags behind XTracker.

Most retail traders price their positions based on the UI counter. But the UI counter is often severely wrong — sometimes lagging by 5-10+ tweets. That lag is the exploitable inefficiency.

Polystrike maintains its own counter — the real counter — by querying Twitter every 60 seconds and classifying each tweet against the exact settlement rules.

CounterSourceUpdate FrequencySettlement Authority
UI CounterPolymarket frontendIrregular, often frozenNone
XTrackerSettlement oracleEvery ~5 minutesYes (determines payouts)
Real CounterPolystrikeEvery 60 secondsNone (but most accurate)

The real counter is 5x faster than the settlement oracle and catches events the oracle never sees (deleted tweets).

Elon Musk deletes tweets. If a tweet existed when XTracker last scraped, it counts toward settlement — even if it’s deleted by the time you check Twitter manually.

Polystrike captures tweets within seconds of posting. If a tweet is later deleted, we flag it with is_deleted: true but it remains in our count. This means:

  • Our real counter may diverge from what you see on Twitter right now
  • That divergence is correct — deleted tweets did count

Not every Elon tweet counts toward Polymarket settlement. The rules are specific:

Tweet TypeCounts?
Main feed postYes
Quote postYes
Repost (retweet)Yes
Main-feed replyYes
Regular replyNo
Community repostNo

XTracker doesn’t expose this classification. Polystrike classifies every tweet in real time and exposes the is_counted field (Pro tier only).

Polystrike tracks three independent lag signals. Each represents a different information asymmetry:

settlement_delta = real_counter - xtracker_counter

What it means: How far ahead of the settlement oracle we are. A positive value means Polystrike has counted tweets that XTracker hasn’t picked up yet — including deleted tweets.

display_delta = real_counter - ui_counter

What it means: How wrong the Polymarket UI is. When this is large, most traders are looking at a stale number and may be mispricing their positions.

internal_delta = ui_counter - xtracker_counter

What it means: The gap between what Polymarket shows and what will actually settle. Can be positive (UI ahead of oracle) or negative (UI behind oracle).

Polystrike runs 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per active event to produce bucket probability forecasts:

  • p5: 5th percentile (optimistic low bound)
  • p50: Median expected count
  • p95: 95th percentile (pessimistic high bound)

The model is sleep-aware — it accounts for Elon’s Texas timezone sleep schedule. Tweeting velocity drops to near-zero during sleep hours, which is deterministic, not random.

  • Final 16 hours: Most reliable. The model has enough data to project accurately.
  • 16-36 hours remaining: Moderate reliability. Use with caution.
  • More than 36 hours: Early predictions carry 15-20% overestimation risk. The model tends to extrapolate current velocity too aggressively.
FeatureFreePro ($79/mo)
Real-time counters & deltasYesYes
Recent tweets (last 15)YesYes
is_counted classificationMasked (null)Yes
Full tweet history + paginationNoYes
Monte Carlo predictionsNoYes
Trading signals (EV, Kelly)NoYes
Portfolio analysisNoYes
Rate limit100 req/hr10,000 req/hr