Skip to main content
Every market names the source that decides it before you can trade it. This page sets out exactly what that source is, what number is read from it, and when. The governing principle throughout: we settle on what the source published at the time, and we do not go back and change it later.

​
Crypto price markets — Coinbase

Crypto markets settle against Coinbase Exchange, read directly from Coinbase’s public API. No aggregator, no index, no third-party price oracle sits in between.

​
The deciding number is the interval’s final trade price

Calibri reads Coinbase’s own candle for the interval the market names. A candle’s close is the last trade price that occurred on Coinbase inside that interval, published by Coinbase itself. So for a five-minute market covering 14:35:00–14:40:00, the number that decides it is the final trade printed on Coinbase before 14:40:00 — as Coinbase reports it. The same holds for a fifteen-minute, hourly, or daily market: the final trade price of that interval, taken directly from Coinbase.
Candles, not a “current price” reading. A spot price fetched at a moment in time is unreproducible — ask twice, get two answers, and a member disputing a settlement has nothing to check. A closed candle for a stated interval is a fixed published fact that anyone can re-request and verify. That is what a resolution has to be.
We do not recompute candles from our own sampled data. What settles the market is the candle Coinbase published, unaltered.

​
Up/down markets

The most common recurring market asks: did this interval close at or above the previous interval’s close?
Both numbers are closes — the last trade of each interval — so the level to beat is known the instant the interval opens, and both can be re-requested from Coinbase and checked. A candle’s own open is not used: Coinbase publishes a candle only some seconds after its interval starts, and its opening trade can differ between Coinbase’s own candle widths.
A tie resolves UP. A close exactly equal to the previous interval’s close is a real outcome on a quiet five-minute market, not a rounding artefact — so it has a stated answer. It resolves YES.

​
Threshold markets

Some markets ask whether the price is above or below a fixed level at a stated moment (“Will BTC be above $100,000 on 30 August?”). These compare the close of the named candle against the threshold written into the market when it was created.

​
Intervals we use

Only widths Coinbase itself publishes: 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours, and 1 day. A width Coinbase does not publish would have to be assembled by us — and an assembled candle is our number, not theirs, which is exactly the property this design exists to avoid.

​
The chart and the settlement come from the same place

The live price you watch on a market page is republished from the same Coinbase feed the market settles against. A chart fed from one venue and a settlement taken from another disagree eventually, and every disagreement is somebody watching one number and being paid on another.
The live line is for drawing. Settlement always reads the authoritative closed candle. In the seconds between an interval ending and its final candle being confirmed, the app marks the figure as not-yet-final rather than showing a number that then moves.

​
No retroactive corrections

This is the important one. A market settles on the data that was live and published at the time the interval closed. If a problem occurred at or around that moment — an outage, a spike, a thin book, a print somebody disputes, or a later restatement by the exchange — the settlement stands. We do not revisit a settled market to apply a correction. Concretely:
  • If Coinbase later revises or restates historical candle data, the market stays settled on the value read at the time.
  • If Coinbase had an incident, a degraded feed, or unusual price action during the interval, that is part of the market. The price that traded is the price that traded.
  • A settled market is terminal. There is no re-resolution path, on Calibri’s side or on-chain.
This is deliberate. A settlement that can be reopened is not a settlement: it means every payout is provisional, winners cannot rely on being paid, and the decision of what counts as “an issue worth fixing” becomes a discretionary judgement made after the money is known. Finality is worth more than after-the-fact accuracy.
Trade accordingly on very short intervals. A five-minute market resolves on a single interval of live exchange data with no correction mechanism behind it.
The one thing that is not a settlement dispute is a market that cannot be resolved at all — no data, an ambiguous question, a cancelled real-world event. Those are voided: every share pays 0.50 and the taker fee is refunded. See Voids and postponements.

​
Sports and event markets

Sports settle against official or established results feeds. These are easier than prices: a fixture has a definitive published outcome, and the sources agree with each other. The same finality rule applies: the result published by the source is the result, and a settled market is not reopened. In practice sports outcomes are unambiguous — a match has a winner — so this rarely comes up. Some situations do not produce a result at all. A postponed fixture is rescheduled where possible rather than voided at 50/50, so the market follows the real-world event and every position stays as traded. Where an event is abandoned outright and no outcome exists, the market is voided and every share pays 0.50. See Voids and postponements.
We add sources as we add categories. Whatever governs a given market is published on that market’s page before trading opens — read it there rather than assuming from this list.

​
Manually-settled markets

Where no machine feed can answer the question, the market publishes a settlement panel: an ordered list of the authorities its outcome may be determined from, split into primary sources (consulted first) and fallbacks (used only where no primary has spoken). The order is the content. It is what decides the outcome when two sources disagree — which is the one situation the hierarchy exists for. It is published on the market before you trade, so it can be quoted back at us. Manual settlements also go through a two-person review: one reviewer proposes the outcome, a second must agree, and a disagreement escalates to a senior adjudicator before anything is paid. A settlement never rests on one person’s reading of a source.

​
Timing

Closing and answering are two different moments.
  • Close is when trading stops.
  • The answer deadline is when the outcome is expected to become knowable. Markets state it separately when the two differ — some sources publish hours after the event.
Crypto markets settle shortly after they close — typically within seconds. Calibri waits a few seconds after an interval ends so Coinbase’s candle is final, reads it, and commits the outcome; there is no further hold for a closed candle. An operator can still freeze a suspect settlement. Sources that report judgement-based results (sports, events) keep a short review window before the outcome is committed. Once committed, resolution is reported on-chain and your winning shares become redeemable.

​
Market terms — reading a market in code

Every automated market publishes terms on its public payload (GET /api/v2/pythia/public/markets/{id} and the event endpoints): the same conditions the market’s rules state in prose, as structured fields. Read these instead of parsing a title — titles are written for people and their wording can change.
terms is omitted for markets settled by hand, which are described by their rules alone.

Market resolution

The on-chain escalation ladder, UMA, and the deadman switch.

Recurring markets

Series, windows, and price-feed markets.

Core concepts

Settlement, payouts, and voiding.

Redeeming winnings

Claiming a payout after resolution.

Terms of use

The rules you accept by trading.