How a round works
The phases of a round, how long each lasts, and where the lock and close prices come from.
A round has three moments that matter: it opens, it locks, and it closes. Everything about your money follows from those three.
The phases
Open — calls are taken
The round starts and accepts calls. You choose UP or DOWN and stake USDG.
The lock price does not exist yet. You are calling a direction from the live price, not staking against a number you can already see.
Lock — the price is fixed, calls stop
At the lock time the contract reads the Chainlink feed and records that value as the round's lock price. No further calls are accepted for this round.
Your stake is now committed and waiting. It is not lost, and it is not settled — it is simply waiting for the close.
Close — the round settles
One round length after lock, the contract reads the same feed again and records the close price.
Close higher than lock, UP wins. Close lower, DOWN wins. Exactly equal, nobody wins and everyone is refunded. The winning side splits the pot, less the 3% fee.
A round length is not the time until you know
This is the single most common misreading, so it is worth being blunt about.
A market's round length is the length of each phase, not of the whole cycle. In a 90-minute market, a round takes calls for 90 minutes, then locks, and then runs locked for another 90 minutes before it closes.
So from opening a round to knowing its result is two round lengths: three hours on a 90-minute market, one hour on a 30-minute one. If you place a call just before lock, you wait one round length. If you place it the moment the round opens, you wait two.
Two rounds are always live
Because each round overlaps the next, every market always has two rounds in flight: one taking calls, and one already locked and waiting to settle. This is why a ticker on its own does not identify a round — the round number and its lock time do.
Where the prices come from
Both the lock price and the close price are read from that market's Chainlink feed. They are whatever the feed reports at the moment settlement is triggered. Each market's feed address is listed in Markets, and you can read it directly on the explorer.
Settlement is permissionless
Nobody holds exclusive power to settle a round. The contract lets anyone trigger settlement, so no single party can decide to sit on a round that is going against them.
The trade-off is worth stating plainly: settlement may be triggered at any point within a 60-second window after the scheduled time, and the price recorded is the feed's latest value at that moment. So the recorded price can move a little inside that window, depending on exactly when the settlement transaction lands.
If nobody triggers settlement inside that 60-second window, the round does not settle at all — and every stake in it becomes refundable instead. See Payouts and refunds.
The feed must be recent
The contract refuses a feed value older than two days. A price that stale is treated as broken rather than used, which means the round cannot settle and falls under the refund rule instead.
This matters because equity feeds are not continuous. They are deviation-driven — a feed publishes when the price moves past a threshold — and they go quiet outside market hours and across weekends. A round that runs through a quiet stretch will often find the feed has not moved at all, which makes lock and close equal: a tie, and a full refund. This is routine, not a malfunction. See Risks.