Index markets
A market on a basket of conditions rather than a single event — how counting works, what settles it, and why none are open for trading yet.
Not open for trading
Index markets are built but switched off. No index market has ever been listed on Acepyr — the live count is zero, and both the switch that allows one to be created and the one that runs the data readings are off.
This page describes how they are designed to work. Nothing here is tradeable today, and there is no date for when it will be. Don't plan around it.
Most prediction markets ask about one thing: will this happen, yes or no. An index market asks about several things at once, and counts.
Instead of a single question, an index market carries a published basket of conditions — between five and twelve of them, fixed and visible before anyone trades. Each condition is independently true or false. At settlement you count how many came true, and compare that count against a threshold.
How the counting works
The basket is published
The market lists its conditions up front, along with the threshold — a whole number, call it k. Both are locked when the market is listed. The basket is never amended afterwards, even if one of its conditions turns out to be awkward.
Each condition is tracked independently
Every condition resolves true or false on its own, from its own data source, on its own schedule. Readings are written to an append-only record, so the path to the final count is visible rather than announced at the end.
At the settlement date, you count
Add up how many conditions came true. That total is the market's score.
The score meets the threshold, or it doesn't
If the score is greater than or equal to k, YES wins. If it's below k, NO wins. Exactly k settles YES.
The design rules that matter
These aren't implementation details — they change how the market behaves and how you would trade it.
| Rule | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Every condition weighs the same | There are no weightings. That's why the threshold is a plain count. A question that genuinely needs one condition to matter more than another is not a fit for this format and won't be listed as one. |
| The threshold is inclusive | Hitting exactly k settles YES, not NO. |
| No early close | The market runs to its settlement date even after the outcome is arithmetically certain. If enough conditions have already come true that NO can't win, the market stays open anyway — so the price should approach $1.00 rather than the market simply ending. |
| A silent source still counts | If a condition's data source stops updating, that condition holds its last published state and stays in the count. It isn't dropped and it isn't forced to false. With equal weights, quietly removing a condition would move the bar for everyone. |
| Enough broken conditions void the market | If two or more conditions can't be evaluated, the market voids and refunds regardless of what the count says. A basket that can't be read honestly doesn't get settled on a guess. |
| Settlement waits for publication | Settlement happens a set period after the measurement window closes, not the instant it ends, so late-published and corrected figures are already in. |
Before a market can be listed at all, its basket has to be replayed against years of historical data — so the question has a track record behind it rather than being a shape someone thought sounded good.
Where the numbers come from
Index conditions are settled by arithmetic on published data, never by judgment. Every field a condition can reference feeds a calculation: a threshold, an average over a trailing period, a year-on-year change, a comparison against a seasonal median. There is no model and no language model anywhere in the path — which is exactly what makes automatic settlement defensible.
The data sources wired today are United States federal open data: the Energy Information Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both publish on fixed schedules and both are freely redistributable, which is the reason they were chosen — a market that settles on a number the public can't check isn't a market anyone should trade.
What isn't wired
Commercial exchange and market-operator feeds are not connected, and adding one isn't a small change: redistributing a commercial exchange's data as the settlement source for a public market generally requires a licence Acepyr doesn't hold. Where an equivalent public series exists it would be used instead, and that choice would be made before a market is listed — never patched in afterwards, because a listed basket is never amended.
How this differs from the other markets
Everything on the Overview applies — the same $1.00-or-nothing shares, the same order book, the same trading fee at execution and rake at settlement.
The difference is what you're forecasting. A Live market is one asset over five minutes. A meta-market is what a crowd privately believes. An index market is a composite: no single condition decides it, so being right means reading a whole basket rather than calling one event.
Still not available
To repeat the point at the top, because it's the one that matters: no index market exists and none can currently be created. Everything above is a description of a built-but-dark feature, not a product you can trade.
Questions
Email [email protected].
Meta-markets
A plain-English guide to Acepyr's signature market: the hidden vote, the traded price, and how the two come together to settle a question nobody else can answer.
Live markets
The fastest loop on Acepyr — rolling five-minute windows on crypto prices, opened continuously and resolved automatically against the exchange print at each window's close.