The immediate distinction is between using the Polymarket app and building software that connects to it. The company's migration guide says ordinary app and website users need no technical migration. Developers have to support the new contracts while continuing to handle holdings recorded by the older Conditional Tokens Framework, or CTF.
Live tests come before the wider rollout
Unchained reported on October 6 that protocol lead Rajath Alex announced production canary markets on October 5. These limited live markets are scheduled to run through October 30, ahead of the tentative November 2 transition for new markets.
A canary rollout tests a system with a restricted scope in its real operating environment. It does not mean every market has moved. Polymarket's official documentation explicitly says that adding V2 support does not convert existing CTF holdings.
For someone holding an older position, the practical question is which contract records that position. An integration that recognizes only the new system would therefore be incomplete, even after it successfully adds V2 trading.
What changes beneath the trading screen
The official contract list places the deployed contracts on Polygon. A shared PositionManager records ERC-1155 position balances, while separate modules handle different market structures. A Router coordinates position operations.
ERC-1155 allows one contract to manage multiple token types. Here, those tokens represent market outcomes. The new architecture organizes how positions are tracked and processed; it does not combine all prediction markets into one event.
Collateral and outcome positions also remain different things. Polymarket describes pUSD as its USDC-backed settlement token. It already existed before this October announcement: the company's changelog documents its introduction in the earlier CLOB V2 upgrade, which went live in April. Protocol V2 changes the position infrastructure beneath trading, rather than announcing pUSD for the first time.
Existing approvals do not automatically cover V2
Polymarket's contract migration instructions specify new permissions for V2 operations. Existing CTF approvals do not carry over. Developers must use the correct position ledger, trading contract and approval target for each market version.
For app users, that can mean a new approval prompt within the service. The relevant check is the permission being requested and the official application presenting it. A headline about migration is not a reason to transfer tokens to an address circulated in a message or article.
Keeping legacy support also matters for accounting. New position handling should not cause an older balance to disappear from a portfolio display simply because it belongs to another contract system.
Developers face a separate October deadline
The Data API migration guide sets October 24, 2026 for retirement of the covered v1 routes. It specifically excludes the existing accounting snapshot route, which has no v2 equivalent.
This is a separate change from the tentative November market rollout. API responses and pagination change, so developers should check their data integration as well as their trading integration.
The key dates serve different purposes: October 24 concerns API routes, October 30 is the reported end of canary testing, and November 2 is a provisional target for new markets. None of them, by itself, means existing positions must be manually moved.
