You need ten settled contracts
Requests are open to traders with a settled track record. The gate is ten contracts that have settled, and the page shows your progress toward it. A contract counts when both things are true:- You were on one side of it — yes or no, it makes no difference which. It has to have actually matched against a counterparty; an order resting on the book is not a contract.
- The market it was traded in has resolved — to yes or to no.
This is the part that surprises people: trading is not enough on its own. A
contract you traded this morning sits at pending until its market resolves, and
pending contracts don’t count. Trade ten contracts today across markets that close
next year and your progress still reads 0 of 10 — it moves as those markets settle.
What doesn’t count
- Open positions. They’re counted the moment their market resolves, not before.
- Voided markets. A market that was cancelled never reached a verdict, so its contracts stay pending forever and never count. Nothing you did wrong — that contract simply can’t be evidence of a completed trade.
- Orders that never filled. No counterparty, no contract.
It counts contracts, not markets
The threshold is ten contracts, and there’s no requirement that they come from ten different markets. Ten contracts in one market gets you there. One order that fills against three separate makers produces three contracts, not one.Why settlement and not just trading
The gate is the strongest anti-spam signal available, and it works because settlement is expensive to fake. Matched contracts are cheap to manufacture — two accounts and a few minutes will produce as many as you like. A settled contract costs real time, because you have to wait for the event, and real money, because a wash trade against yourself still pays the taker fee and still puts one side on the losing end. That’s what makes it worth requiring. The cost is borne honestly: a new trader who does everything right still waits for their markets to resolve. There’s no partial credit for open positions.What to submit
The lower bound on the date keeps out events that have already happened; the upper
bound keeps “will humanity colonise Mars by 2300?” out of the review queue.
A request with a named resolution source and a stated edge case gets reviewed
faster than one without, because it can be assessed rather than researched.
Submission limits
Beyond the ten-contract gate, four limits shape the queue. Ordinary use never touches any of them.- 10 pending at a time. Once you have ten unreviewed requests, you wait for review before submitting more.
- 15 per day, by default.
- A reputation throttle. Once you have review history, a poor approval ratio lowers that daily cap: 3 or more reviewed with under half approved drops you to 3 a day; 5 or more reviewed with under a fifth approved drops you to 1 a day. A clean record never triggers it, and a member with no history yet is on the default cap.
- 5 submissions an hour, which mostly exists to absorb accidental double-submits.
- No duplicate titles among your own pending requests.
After you submit
Your request appears in Request history on the same page with one of three states:- Pending review — in the queue.
- Approved — the idea was accepted. Reviewer notes, if any, appear with it.
- Rejected — with notes explaining why, where there’s something useful to say.
Related
Core concepts
Binary markets, prices as probabilities, settlement.
How markets are resolved
What a market settles against, and why it is never revised.
Placing orders
How a matched contract comes about in the first place.
Fees
The single taker fee.