Author：Odaily 星球日报

Original | Odaily Planet Daily@OdailyChina)

Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

In conventional understanding, time is linear, but there are "exceptions" in the crypto world.

Yesterday, Eastern Time (ET) switched from Standard Time (EST) to Daylight Saving Time (EDT) as usual (usually at 2:00 AM on the second Sunday of March). Clocks moved forward one hour, jumping directly from 2:00 AM on March 8th to 3:00 AM. Time didn't simply disappear; the Eastern United States switches between EST and EDT according to custom. The purpose is to artificially adjust the time scale, thereby making fuller use of daylight hours (and incidentally saving electricity).

For people's daily lives, this switch will not have a significant impact.However, yesterday's time zone switch on the prediction market Polymarket directly sparked unexpected controversy.

Polymarket embroiled in timing controversy

The controversy arose from a "cryptocurrency price fluctuation" prediction event on Polymarket.

Polymarket offers cryptocurrency price fluctuation prediction events with time ranges of year, month, week, day, 4 hours, 1 hour, 15 minutes, and 5 minutes. It supports major tokens such as BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP. These events are automatically created and settled according to Eastern Time and have now become one of the important sources of trading volume on Polymarket.

At 1:00 AM on March 8th (during Eastern Time), Polymarket launched a new round of 1-hour price movement predictions for BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP. The link to the relevant event is below.

• BTC (Final Result: Up):https://polymarket.com/event/bitcoin-up-or-down-march-8-1am-et

• ETH (Final Result: Decline):https://polymarket.com/event/ethereum-up-or-down-march-8-1am-et

• SOL (Final Result: Decline):https://polymarket.com/event/solana-up-or-down-march-8-1am-et

• XRP (Final Result: Decline):https://polymarket.com/event/xrp-up-or-down-march-8-1am-et

According to the event determination rules—comparing the opening and closing prices of the candlestick chart one hour after the start of the event in the Binance USDT trading pair—all four events mentioned above have now been settled.

However, because the end time of this batch of events coincided with the change of daylight saving time, Eastern Time jumped directly to 3:00 the moment it reached 2:00 (i.e., the time period from 2:00 to 3:00 was skipped), which caused some confusion in the timing of this batch of events on the Polymarket platform itself.

As shown in the Polymarket front-end interface,This may be because 2:00 did not exist in yesterday's Eastern Time time, and the current time period for this batch of events is "March 8, 1-1 AM ET" (i.e., 1:00 AM - 1:00 AM on March 8).However, under normal timing conditions, such events should present a 1-hour time cycle (for example, the same event the previous day would be "March 7, 1-2 AM ET", i.e., 1:00 - 2:00). If the impact of daylight saving time is taken into account, the more reasonable time cycle for this batch of events should be "March 8, 1-3 AM ET" (i.e., 1:00 - 3:00, which is still 1 hour in essence).

So no matter how you look at it, the "March 8, 1-1 AM ET" currently displayed on the front end is very strange.

Chinese-speaking user "小Z" (@richrichardoz) commented on X.PostIn addition to the front-end, Polymarket's API also displays a "1-1 AM ET" time period.This caused the automated programs that ran based on the data returned by the API to "completely crash," resulting in an estimated loss of over $100,000.

"Little Z" further explained that having the start and end times exactly the same is a logically impossible market condition. Many automated trading systems rely on end time to determine trading windows, and this error directly caused the program to lose a significant amount of money. Therefore, it is recommended that Polymarket change the time standard for the relevant events to UTC time and compensate users affected by the data problem.

Besides the user in question, many other users on foreign websites have also left comments expressing their doubts about the incident, but as of the time of writing, Polymarket has not yet responded through official channels.

Time standards in traditional financial markets

Looking back at this controversy, although the scale of the impact was not large, it exposed a fundamental design flaw in Polymarket's "cryptocurrency price fluctuation market" incident.

Influenced by historical customs, economic status, and industry practices, Eastern Time is still widely used across various industries. However, this is not actually friendly to the financial system because Eastern Time switches between Daylight Saving Time and Standard Time every year—that is, clocks are artificially advanced or de-escalated by one hour at specific times, thus causing time "jumps" and "overlaps" respectively.

In modern financial systems, UTC time has long been the de facto universal standard.In most financial infrastructures, internal systems typically use the UTC timestamp as the sole standard time. While local times such as Eastern Time are still used, they often only exist in the user-facing presentation layer in the system logic. This design is precisely to avoid the uncertainty of the time system and ensure that time remains monotonous, unique, and globally consistent in financial trading, clearing, and automation systems.

The crux of the Polymarket controversy lies in the fact that the events in question used Eastern Time as the time standard but failed to adequately account for the potential variables brought about by Daylight Saving Time switching, ultimately leading to inconsistencies between the front-end and API data. In today's prediction market user base, an increasing number of participants are trading through APIs and automated programs. Minor issues that initially only affect front-end display can easily be amplified into real financial losses within automated systems.

In retrospect, this controversy may not be considered a serious incident, and theoretically it could only happen twice a year at most. However, it reveals a more serious design problem – as the prediction market gradually moves towards becoming financial infrastructure, it must also follow the engineering standards adopted by financial infrastructure.