Risks

Read this before you stake anything. None of it is hypothetical.

You can lose your entire stake

If you call the direction wrong on a decided round, your stake is gone. All of it. It goes to the winning side. There is no partial loss, no stop, no liquidation price and nothing to salvage — the round is decided one way or the other and the losing side pays for it.

You cannot get out once you are in

A call cannot be cancelled, sold, reduced or hedged in the same round. Once your transaction confirms, your stake is committed until the round settles. If you change your mind thirty seconds later, there is nothing you can do.

The odds you saw were never a quote

The multiple shown before lock is the pot divided by your side, less the fee. It moves with every call anyone places, right up to lock. If a lot of money arrives on your side after you call, your share of the pot shrinks accordingly — and nothing about the multiple you saw when you staked is preserved.

The price is whatever the feed says

The lock and close prices are the values the Chainlink feed reports at the moment settlement is triggered. Not the exchange's official price, not a price you can see on another venue, and not an average — just what that feed says at that moment.

Because settlement can be triggered by anyone at any point within the 60-second window after the scheduled time, the recorded price can move a little inside that window depending on when the transaction lands. A round that was very close either way can be decided by that.

If you disagree with the feed, you have no recourse against it. It is the sole input that decides the round.

Equity feeds go quiet

These are equity feeds, and equities do not trade around the clock. The feeds go quiet outside market hours, overnight, at weekends and on market holidays. They also publish on deviation rather than continuously, so even during the session a flat stretch produces no new price.

Two consequences:

• Rounds that run through quiet periods often tie. Lock and close come back equal, nobody wins, and everyone is refunded. You get your money back, but your capital was committed for the whole round and did nothing.
• A round cannot settle against a feed value more than two days old. Instead of settling, it becomes refundable. Again, your stake comes back, but it was tied up in the meantime.

Neither of these loses you money directly. Both mean your stake can be unavailable for a while and then simply handed back.

A round can fail to settle

Settlement must be triggered within 60 seconds of the scheduled time. Anyone can trigger it, which means no single party can hold a round hostage — but it also means it is not guaranteed to happen. If that window passes untriggered, the round never settles and every stake in it becomes refundable.

You do not lose your stake in that case. You do lose the round.

It is software, and it holds your money

Your stake sits in a contract while a round runs. That contract is a minimal fork of PancakePredictionV3, a design that has been running in production elsewhere for years, and the changes made to it are few and deliberate — keeping the difference small is itself the point. That is a reason for some confidence in the foundations; it is not a claim that this deployment is free of faults. Smart contracts can contain them, and you should not stake money you cannot afford to lose.

Availability

Not available to US persons, or in Canada, the UK or Switzerland. No financial advice. You can lose your stake.