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.
Most prediction markets ask you one question: what will happen? Will this candidate win, will this price go up, will this team score. Mirror asks something nobody else does: what does everybody actually believe, when nobody can see them answer?
That number doesn't exist anywhere. You can't Google it, and you can't scrape it off social media, because what people post and what people privately think are two different things. The only way to find out is to build a market that measures it. That's Mirror.
Read this first
Acepyr is pre-mainnet. The $ACEPYR that exists today is a testnet token, a symbolic point system. It carries no economic value, no USDC claim, and no revenue share. It cannot be bought and may never have any value. For anything money-related, How Acepyr's economics work is the single source of truth.
The two lines
Every Mirror market has two separate things running at the same time. Understanding the difference is basically the whole game.
1. The vote — what people actually believe
- Anyone can vote YES or NO on the question. One tap, that's it.
- It's blind. You can't see the running result while you vote, so nobody is copying anybody or piling onto a winner.
- It's free, and $ACEPYR can't touch it. A large balance and a small one weigh exactly the same. You cannot buy votes, at any price.
- The result is a number, something like 68%. That's the crowd's real answer, and it stays hidden the entire time the market is open.
2. The market — what $ACEPYR guesses the vote will say
- Separately, traders buy YES or NO shares with $ACEPYR, the same way they would on any other market.
- The price is the market guessing what the hidden vote is going to say. YES trading at $0.62 means the market thinks the vote is landing on the YES side.
- Nobody trading can see the real vote while the market is open.
The short version
You're not predicting the news. You're reading the room. The skill is figuring out what a hidden crowd of real people privately thinks, and spotting when the market has got that wrong.
How a market runs, start to finish
People vote
The question goes up. Anyone votes YES or NO, blind. Votes keep coming in the whole time the market is open, the crowd never closes on its own.
Traders trade
You buy YES or NO shares with $ACEPYR. Shares are cheap if you think the vote is going to surprise everyone.
The market closes
Every Mirror market has a settle deadline, and that deadline is what closes it. If too few votes have come in by then, the market voids and everyone is refunded.
A market can also close early, once the price has converged on the vote — within 3% for 10 minutes straight, with the timer resetting if it drifts back out of that band. Early convergence closing is not currently switched on, so in practice markets today run to their deadline.
Everyone gets paid
The vote is revealed. If it landed above 50%, every YES share pays $1. If it landed below 50%, every NO share pays $1. The losing side pays $0. If the vote lands exactly on 50/50, there's no losing side to pay from, so the market refunds everyone instead.
A worked example
Question: "Is pineapple acceptable on pizza?"
You reckon the crowd secretly says yes, people are more relaxed about it than they admit in public. YES shares are cheap at $0.35, because the market thinks the crowd is going to say no.
| You buy | 100 YES shares for 35 $ACEPYR |
| The vote closes at | 68% — that's above 50, so YES wins |
| Your shares pay | 100 × 1 = 100 $ACEPYR |
| You made | 65 $ACEPYR |
If the vote had closed at 41%, YES loses, and your 100 shares would be worth 0 $ACEPYR, you'd have lost the 35 you put in. That's the trade.
The rules that matter
- You vote once. Your vote locks after you cast it, so nobody can vote one way, trade the other way, then flip their vote to move the result under their own position.
- Everyone else can still vote. Locking your vote doesn't lock the crowd. New people keep arriving and moving the number right up until the market closes.
- 200 votes minimum. Under that, the market can't close, it just refunds everyone. This stops a small group from coordinating and flipping a thin market.
- Your side is the shares you hold, not the price you paid. You can even hold both YES and NO shares at once; each one settles on its own.
- Winners are paid by losers. Acepyr is never betting against you. It just matches people up and takes a small flat fee, and it earns the same fee whichever side wins.
Quick glossary
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| The Vote | The blind, free, one-per-person poll that decides settlement. |
| The Market | The traded YES/NO price, guessing where the vote will land. |
| Share | One contract. Pays $1 if your side wins, $0 if it doesn't. |
| Convergence | When the market price comes within 3% of the real vote and holds for 10 minutes. It can close a market early, but it is not currently switched on. |
| Quorum | The 200-vote minimum. No quorum, no settlement, everyone gets refunded. |
| Settlement | The payout. Decided by whether the vote landed above or below 50%; an exact 50/50 vote refunds everyone. |
Where this fits
A meta-market is one of two ways Acepyr answers a question the world won't settle for you. It closes on a date and tells you where the room landed. The other is a permanent track record, which never closes and tells you who has been right across everything that came after — see Cognitive markets for how the two fit together.
Questions
Email [email protected].
Overview
How an Acepyr market works — reading the price, the two engines that fill your order, where liquidity comes from, what the fees are, and how a market resolves.
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.