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Five guides on the mechanics underneath a prediction-market price and a crypto perpetual. Written to be checked against the market in front of you, not to be agreed with.
- Guides
- 5
- Words written
- 12,363
- Reading time
- 57 min
Word counts and reading times are computed from the text of the guides when the site is built, at 220 words a minute. They measure the writing, not its audience: we do not publish reader counts, because we do not measure them.
What this is
These are reference guides rather than posts. Each one takes a single mechanism — what a 0–1 share is, what a funding payment settles, what happens inside a liquidation engine — and explains it in enough detail that you can verify the explanation against a live market. They get revised when the mechanism changes; they are not dated commentary.
They are written for someone who has already opened an account, found the interface easy and the mechanics opaque, and suspects that the gap is expensive. It is. Most of what looks arbitrary on a one-minute chart is a margin engine, a funding timestamp or an empty book behaving exactly as designed.
Nothing here is a recommendation and nothing here is gated. A guide that only pays off if you buy something is a brochure with footnotes; these are meant to stay useful to someone who never becomes a customer.
How these guides are written
- Mechanisms are explained in full; predictions are not made. Where a question has an empirical answer we have not measured, the guide says so rather than guessing.
- No statistic appears without a source. The measured figures on this site come from our own database and are published with their coverage on the public register; anything else is either cited or labelled as an example.
- Worked examples are labelled as worked examples. They use round numbers chosen for clarity — they illustrate arithmetic, and they are never measurements of a venue.
Three tracks, in reading order
Start where your gap is. The first track assumes nothing. The second assumes you can read a chart and want to know what produces it. The third is about judging a number — anyone’s number, including ours.
Foundations
1 guide
What the instrument is and how it settles. If you have never held a share that pays exactly one dollar or exactly nothing, start here.
How prediction markets work
The mechanics underneath a 0–1 price: share creation, matching, liquidity, resolution, and why an exchange is not a bookmaker.
12-minute read
Market structure
3 guides
The three mechanisms behind most of what looks inexplicable on a crypto chart: the order book that sets your cost, the funding rate that anchors a perpetual to spot, and the margin engine that manufactures forced flow.
Order book depth: reading a level-2 book
Depth, spread and imbalance in practice — plus the harder question of which part of a book is real.
11-minute read
Funding rates explained
The mechanism that anchors a perpetual to spot — and what a persistently expensive rate is really telling you about positioning.
11-minute read
Liquidations and cascades
How forced selling is manufactured, why it arrives all at once, and what a liquidation map is really showing you.
12-minute read
Judgment
1 guide
How to tell a probability that means something from one that does not. This is the guide that makes every other number on this site checkable, including ours.
Calibration: why a 70% forecast should be wrong 30% of the time
The difference between being right and being honest about how often you are right — and why only one of the two can be traded on.
11-minute read
Where to go next
The public register
Our own forecasting record: the price-by-outcome table, the share of slots whose outcome could never be retrieved, and the decomposition that undercuts the headline rate.
The tools
Where the same mechanics meet live data on the venues we sample. The guides explain the reading; the tools do the reading.
4Free calculators