Real Copy Trading Setup

Real Copy Trading executes actual on-chain trades on Polymarket using your wallet and real capital. It mirrors buys from traders matched by your Filter, sized against the capital you configure, with on-chain settlement.

This page walks through the one-time setup. For trade configuration details (capital, exits, entry rules), see Pods.

Two ways to fund real trading

You choose a wallet mode when you create the pod:

• Custodial (managed): Airavat generates a dedicated trading wallet for you. The key is created inside a hardware security module and is non-extractable, even by Airavat. You fund it by depositing USDC.e or pUSD (plus POL for gas) to the address shown after creation. This is the simplest path and skips the private-key steps below.
• BYOK (bring your own key): you supply the private key of a Polygon wallet you control. The rest of this page walks through the BYOK setup in detail.

Funding, withdrawals, and transfers for both modes are covered in Wallets, Deposits & Withdrawals.

Prerequisites (BYOK)

• A Polygon EOA wallet whose private key you control (MetaMask or any wallet you can export the private key from)
• USDC on Polygon for trading capital
• POL on Polygon for gas (minimum 0.05 recommended)

Step 1: Prepare your wallet

Pick the path that matches how you use Polymarket.

If you use MetaMask on Polymarket

Polymarket creates a proxy wallet (a Gnosis Safe) when you sign in with MetaMask. The proxy holds your USDC and open positions. Your MetaMask wallet is the signer that authorizes trades.

You’ll need two things:

1. Your MetaMask private key. In MetaMask, open the account menu, click Account Details, then Show Private Key.
2. Your Polymarket proxy wallet address. Open your Polymarket profile page. The address shown there is the proxy that holds your USDC and positions.

If you use a standalone EOA

If you don’t use Polymarket (or you want a fresh wallet just for Airavat), create a new Polygon EOA in MetaMask or any wallet tool. You only need its private key. Alternatively, choose a Custodial wallet and skip key handling entirely.

Recommended: use a dedicated wallet, not your main one. Your key is encrypted and isolated in a hardware-backed signing service after import (see Security and credentials), but limiting exposure is always good practice.

Magic-link Polymarket accounts

If you signed up on Polymarket with email (magic link), you do not have direct access to your private key. Airavat cannot operate that wallet. Create a standalone EOA and fund it directly instead.

Step 2: Fund your wallet

Two balances matter on Polygon mainnet.

POL is Polygon’s native gas token (formerly MATIC). Bridge or buy on Polygon mainnet, not Ethereum.

The signer EOA always needs POL even when your USDC lives in a proxy wallet, because every trade requires the signer to produce an on-chain signature and every approval tx costs gas.

Step 3: Create the Real Copy Trade pod

1. Go to the Pods tab on the Polymarket dashboard
2. Click the + button
3. Select Real Copy Trade as the pod type
4. Enter the Name and Filter (the filter cannot be changed later).
5. Choose the wallet mode:
   • Custodial: no key to enter. Optionally set a Withdrawal Address. The trading wallet address appears after creation; fund it then.
   • BYOK: fill in the credentials:
     • Private Key: paste your wallet’s private key. The field is masked. Accepts 64 hex chars with or without the 0x prefix.
     • Polymarket Address: your Polymarket proxy (Safe) wallet address, where your balance and positions live.
     • Withdrawal Address: required. Where funds are sent when you withdraw. Pre-filled with your wallet address; you can change it.
6. Configure capital, exit rules, and entry rules. See Pods for the full field reference, including Real Copy Trade specifics like Max Slippage and Unique across pods.
7. Click Create.

As soon as you enter a valid private key, Airavat derives the wallet address and checks its POL balance. If the balance is below 0.05 POL, a Low Gas Balance warning appears showing the wallet address so you can fund it. You can still submit the form. Just fund before the first trade fires.

Wallet credentials are locked after creation. To use a different wallet, create a new pod and delete the old one. Other config fields (capital, exits, entry rules) remain editable.

Step 4: What happens on the first trade

The first time a matching trade fires on a newly created pod, Airavat runs a one-time on-chain authorization flow (automatic, no user intervention needed) that allows Polymarket’s exchange contracts to spend your trading collateral and transfer your position tokens during sells. The flow covers both the standard CLOB exchange and the Negative Risk exchange used by some markets.

If your wallet holds USDC.e (the legacy Polygon USDC token) instead of native USDC, Airavat also wraps it 1:1 to pUSD on first use. pUSD is the trading collateral on Polymarket’s V2 contracts, and the wrap is one-direction only.

These authorizations are idempotent. They run once per wallet and are skipped on every trade after. The first trade takes roughly 2 to 10 extra seconds while everything settles; subsequent trades skip this step.

After authorization, the order fires as a Fill-And-Kill market order. Whatever fills at the best available prices fills. Anything unfilled is canceled. There are no leftover resting orders.

If authorization fails (typically because the signer has no POL for gas), the trade is rejected and a failure entry appears in the Activity log. Add POL to the signer EOA and the next matching trade retries automatically.

Step 5: Monitor your positions

Click your pod on the Pods tab to open the detail page.

• Performance summary at the top: effective capital, total PnL, win and loss counts, open and closed position counts
• Positions tab: open and closed positions with entry price, current price, unrealized PnL, exit type
• Activity tab: every buy, scale-up, sell, auto-sell, and reconciliation with timestamps and transaction hashes linked to Polygonscan
• Analytics tab: aggregated performance metrics and breakdowns across dimensions like trader, market tag, hour of day, and entry price

Position status progresses through:

Security and credentials

Your wallet credentials are protected end to end:

• Hardware-backed key isolation. Keys are held in a dedicated, isolated signing service backed by a hardware security module (HSM). For a Custodial wallet the key is generated inside the HSM and is non-extractable by anyone, including Airavat. For BYOK, your imported key is encrypted the moment it arrives and is never stored in plaintext.
• Remote signing, never exposed. Every transaction is signed inside the isolated signing service. The raw key is never held in application memory, never written to logs, and never sent back out. Signing is restricted to Polymarket trading operations only, so a key cannot be repurposed to sweep a wallet to an arbitrary address.
• Immutable and revocable. Credentials are locked after creation and cannot be read back through the app. If you believe a key is compromised, delete the pod immediately; deletion permanently destroys the associated signing key.
• Rotation. To move to a different wallet, create a new pod with the new key and delete the old one.

Common issues

See Troubleshooting for:

• Low gas and approval failures
• Position anomalies (disappeared, shrunk, grown, appeared)
• Manual position close behavior
• Order fill and settlement questions