Sandbox Mode
Rehearse the full live trading flow with simulated orders — and what stays real.
Polymarket has no official testnet — no faucet, no play-money chain, no way to rehearse the real order flow with fake USDC. Sandbox Mode is Predite's answer: a per-account switch that unlocks the entire Live Trading interface and then quietly intercepts every order you place, recording it as a paper position instead of sending it to the exchange.
Turning it on
Sandbox Mode requires an active Bot plan. The toggle is in Settings → Trading, in the purple card 🧪 Sandbox Mode. Flip it and the page reloads; flip it back to leave. Enabling it without the Bot plan returns bot_plan_required and points you at the upgrade page. Both enabling and disabling are written to your audit log.
While it is on, an amber banner sits at the top of every dashboard page: 🧪 SANDBOX MODE — trades are simulated, no real money involved, with a Configure link back to the settings card. The ✕ dismisses the banner for the current session only — the mode stays on until you toggle it off.
What it changes
- •It bypasses beta approval. Real trading is gated per account by a beta flag. Sandbox satisfies the Eligibility checklist without it, so the full Live Trading UI is visible and clickable immediately. The eligibility row says so: *"Sandbox Mode is on — using simulated trades"*.
- •It intercepts every entry, from every origin. Not just the manual ticket — bots, copy trading and TWAP call the same guarded executor straight from cron jobs, and the check lives inside that executor. This matters: an earlier version only honoured Sandbox on the manual route, so cron-driven bots were spending real USDC while the banner promised simulation.
- •Where the trade lands. The intercepted order is written to your paper positions with the market title prefixed
[SANDBOX], so it appears in Paper Trading alongside your other simulated positions and is easy to tell apart.
The response you get back looks like a successful trade — order id, status, fill timestamp — deliberately, so the interface you are rehearsing behaves exactly as it would live.
What it does NOT change
Exits stay real. Sandbox only intercepts orders that *open* exposure. A SELL that closes a position passes straight through to the exchange.
This is intentional and it is the most important thing to understand about the mode. If you already hold real positions and switch Sandbox on, your stop-loss, take-profit and trailing stops must still be able to sell. Simulating those exits would silently disarm every protection over a live position while the interface claimed all was well. So: Sandbox simulates what you open; it never blocks you from reducing real exposure.
It also touches nothing outside order execution. Market data, the scanner, whale tracking, alerts and analytics stay live — the sandbox is not a fake market, it is a real market you are not paying to enter.
Sandbox vs Paper Trading
They share a table, but they are different tools:
- •Paper Trading is a standalone simulator with its own page and a virtual $10,000 starting balance. You go there *deliberately* to open a simulated position. It needs no Bot plan and has nothing to do with the live trading stack.
- •Sandbox Mode is a mode you put your *real* trading into. You use the real surfaces — the ticket from a signal, a bot's execution loop — and Predite converts the entry to paper at the last moment. It requires the Bot plan, because its whole point is rehearsing Bot-plan machinery.
Use Paper Trading to test an idea. Use Sandbox to test your setup: that the wallet flow, the bot rules, the caps and the notifications all behave as you expect before real money is involved.
Going truly live
Turn Sandbox off, then get beta access granted on your account. Both are required — Sandbox off with no beta flag means real orders are refused with E_BETA, and beta granted with Sandbox still on means everything keeps being simulated. The Your safety guards card shows both states, so you always know which one is holding you back.