Settlement currencies

1A market is denominated in one currency

You stake in the market's currency and you are paid in the market's currency. Nothing in the contract swaps, wraps or bridges anything.

An ETH market takes native ETH; a USDC market takes USDC; a market in a project's own launch token takes that token. There is no conversion step anywhere — not when you stake, not when the market settles, not when you claim. If you want a different asset at the end of it, that is a trade you make yourself, afterwards.

The currency is fixed when the market is created and is part of its identity: two markets asking the same question in different currencies are two separate markets with separate pots.

2What you get if you win

Your stake, divided by the winning pool, multiplied by whatever is left of the pot after the fee.

your payout = your stake ÷ winning pool × (pot − fee)

Every stake joins one of two pools, YES or NO. At the deadline the market reads one number on this chain, one side is right, and the whole pot goes to that side in proportion to what each person on it staked.

If you lose you get nothing. Your stake is precisely what pays the winners — there is no consolation, no partial return, and no house on the other side of your trade taking the risk.

The final division truncates, so the payouts always add up to at or just under the pot. The remainder — under one base unit per claimant — stays in the contract, is never paid twice and is never swept.

3The fee, and who pays it

This deployment charges 2% of the pot on ETH markets, read from the settlement registry just now. It is taken once, at settlement, and the winners carry it.

The fee comes off the pot before the winning side splits it. The losing side loses its stake either way, so the fee does not change what a loser loses — it comes entirely out of what the winners would otherwise have received.

• Set per currency. ETH, a stablecoin and a project token can each carry a different rate. The market you are looking at shows the one that applies to it.
• Snapshotted when the market is created. A rate change afterwards cannot reach a market that is already open, so the fee you staked under is the fee you settle under.
• Hard-capped at 5% on chain. The cap is a constant in the registry, not a setting, so no owner and no configuration can go above it.

4When everyone gets their stake back

In two cases nobody wins, everybody is refunded exactly what they staked, and no fee is charged at all.

• Nobody took the other side. If either pool is empty at settlement, every staker gets their own stake back at par. There was no counterparty, so there was nothing to win, and charging a fee on a bet that never had an opposite side would simply be taking your money.
• The market was voided. Settlement is permissionless within a window that opens at the deadline; if that window closes with nobody having settled it, the market voids. Everyone is refunded at par, again with no fee. The failure mode is “nobody profits”, never “the wrong side is paid”.

Refunds work identically in every currency, and pausing can never block a claim — there is no path in the contract that holds a refund back.

5Worked example — a market in ETH

Two people back YES with 1 ETH each, one backs NO with 3. YES is right, and each winner comes away with 2.45 × their stake.

ETH is what gas is priced in and what every curve on The Hood raises, so a win here needs no further step to be useful on this chain. It is not a stable unit, though: what you win is a quantity of ETH, and its price moves while the market is open.

6Worked example — a market in USDC

The NO side is right this time. The two YES stakers lose 200 USDC each, and that 400 USDC is exactly what pays the NO side its profit.

A stablecoin is the one case where the payout you read now is the payout you can spend later: the arithmetic is in dollars from start to finish, and nothing about the number can move between staking and claiming. What you are trusting instead is the issuer — redemption, attestations, and the freeze powers on the token contract.

Note the two winners are not equal

Ana staked three times what Kofi did and receives three times as much. Parimutuel payouts are strictly proportional inside the winning pool: there is no first-mover bonus and no price you locked in earlier. Everyone on the winning side gets the same multiple.

7Worked example — a market in a project's own token

Identical split to the ETH market, and therefore an identical 2.45 × multiple — but the pot is denominated in one project's token, so what that multiple is worth is a separate question.

ALPHA here is the settlement currency, not the subject: the pot is in ALPHA, the question is about a different launch. A project token's price moves on its own while the market is open, so you can win the bet and still hold less value than you staked, or lose the bet and watch the token run. You are taking two positions at once — one on the question, one on ALPHA.

The losing side's risk is the same shape in reverse: Nina is out 30,000 ALPHA whatever ALPHA is worth on the day, and no fall in its price gives any of it back.

8Where each currency comes from

Three routes in, and they are not equivalent — each one is a different thing to trust.

• ETH is listed when the registry is deployed, has no delisting path and cannot be denylisted. A market in it depends on nothing beyond this chain being up.
• A stablecoin is listed by the protocol owner. A stablecoin's risk is a judgement about an issuer, and no on-chain measurement stands in for that judgement — so it is a decision somebody makes, deliberately, rather than a bar something clears.
• A project's own token is registered by that launch's creator — no approval, no queue, no review — once the launch has graduated and is large and widely enough held that a pot in it means something. The bar is enforced in the registry, and the owner's only power afterwards is a kill switch that blocks new markets and cannot touch a live one.

Usable on this deployment right now:ETH

Create a market — you pick the currency when you write the question. Or read how a market works end to end.