Live markets
Rolling Up-or-Down windows on crypto, tokenized-equity and commodity prices — an hour or six hours long, traded on the order book, and settled automatically against the exchange's last trade at each window's close.
Up or down, on the clock. A Live market asks one question about a fixed window: "Will BTC close higher at the end of this 60-minute window than it opened?" You take Up or Down on the order book, the window closes, and the exchange's price settles it automatically. Windows follow each other back to back, so there is always one in play.
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. For anything money-related, How Acepyr's economics work is the single source of truth.
What's running
| Hour-long windows | BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, BNB, HYPE, NVDA, SPCX |
| Six-hour windows | TSLA, SPY, META, PLTR, GOLD, SILVER, OIL |
| Boundaries | Aligned to the UTC clock: every hour on the hour, and 00:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00 for six-hour windows |
| Sides | Up or Down |
| The line | The opening price, recorded when the window opens |
| How it trades | On the order book, with limit orders |
| What settles it | The exchange's last trade at the window's close |
| An unchanged price | Refunds. Neither side wins |
Windows run around the clock, weekends included. A market titled BTC Up or Down (14:00–15:00 UTC) is exactly what it sounds like: its line is BTC's price at 14:00, and it settles on BTC's price at 15:00.
About the equity tickers. NVDA (NVIDIA), SPCX (SpaceX), TSLA (Tesla), SPY (S&P 500 ETF), META (Meta) and PLTR (Palantir) are tokenized equities: tokens that trade on a crypto exchange and whose underlying is a listed share. A window on one is judged on the token's price on that exchange, around the clock. It is not judged on the stock exchange's own print, and it doesn't pause outside stock-market hours.
About the commodities. GOLD (Gold) is judged on Tether Gold (XAUT/USDT), a token on Binance whose underlying is physical gold. SILVER (Silver) and OIL (WTI Crude Oil) are judged on OKX's XAG/USDT and CL/USDT perpetual swaps, because no exchange Acepyr reads lists a spot token for either. A perpetual swap tracks its underlying closely, but its price is set by trading in the swap itself, so it can sit apart from the spot silver price or the WTI benchmark quoted elsewhere. All three trade around the clock, weekends included.
How a window opens
The next window is already there
Each instrument always has the window in progress and the next one lined up behind it, so trading doesn't gap at the boundary.
The opening price becomes the line
At the window's opening instant, Acepyr reads the exchange's last trade at or before that moment. That price is the line the window is judged against, the price to beat, and it is stored with the market.
Trading opens once the line is set
Orders on a window are accepted only after its opening price is recorded. Nobody trades a window before its line exists.
The venue's ladder
The venue rests a ladder of buy orders on both sides of every window and re-prices it as the price moves, so there is something to trade against from the open. As the underlying drifts above or below the line, the ladder follows the odds of Up rather than staying where it started.
Three things about it:
- It only rests. The venue's orders wait to be crossed. It never takes an order you have resting.
- It is finite. It can be bought through, and the book can be thin on one side.
- It comes down shortly before the close. In the final stretch of a window, the book holds only what other traders have left resting.
You can quote too. Anyone can rest orders on both sides of a window. Market making covers how that works and what it costs, and the market maker's playbook covers how to quote a Live window well.
How to trade a window
Every order on a Live window is a limit order on the book: you name Up or Down, a price and a number of shares, and the order either crosses something already resting or waits. Trading the order book has the full operating detail: what an order locks, who fills first, and how a "market buy" is built from a limit order.
How long an order rests. The trade panel offers Until cancelled, Fill now or cancel, or a timed expiry that fits the window:
| Window | Timed expiries |
|---|---|
| Hour-long | 1, 5, 15 or 30 minutes |
| Six-hour | 5, 15 or 30 minutes, or 1, 2 or 4 hours |
Longer durations drop off the menu as the window runs down.
Getting out early. Selling before the close is a sell order on the same book, and it fills only when someone is bidding at your price.
At the close. Orders are refused once a window's end time passes, and any order still resting is cancelled with its escrow released when the window resolves. What happens to your open orders covers this.
How a window settles
The closing price is read
At the window's end, the same exchange is read again: its last trade at or before the closing instant.
Up wins if the close is higher
Up wins when the closing price is above the opening price. Down wins when it is below. Winning shares pay $1.00 and losing shares pay $0.00.
An unchanged price refunds
If the closing price is exactly equal to the opening price, neither side won. The window is cancelled and every position in it is refunded.
A tie is a refund, not a win for Up
The comparison is strictly above or strictly below. A close that lands exactly on the line names no winner, so it doesn't settle at all.
Because Live windows trade on the order book, the book's payout rule applies: a winning share pays out of the reserve traders funded when they traded. How the order book works explains why that reserve always covers the winning side.
Which exchange
Binance is the settlement exchange. OKX is used for HYPE, SILVER and OIL, which Binance doesn't list, and as the fallback when Binance can't be read. GOLD's fallback is OKX's gold perpetual swap (XAU/USDT). SILVER and OIL have no fallback: OKX is the only exchange Acepyr reads that lists them.
The opening and closing prices always come from the same exchange. If Binance can't supply a window's closing price, the window is moved to OKX after the close and both prices are read there: the opening price is re-read from OKX for the same instant. The line it settles against can then differ slightly from the one shown while the window traded.
On the thinner instruments, the last trade before a boundary can be minutes old. It is still the price that counts.
The price you see versus the price that settles
Acepyr uses two different price readings, and the distinction is deliberate.
- The live ticker on the market page is a streaming quote, there so you can watch the window move. For some instruments it comes from a different feed than the one that settles, and SILVER and OIL refresh it by polling rather than streaming.
- The settlement price is the exchange's last trade at the window's boundary.
Only the second one ever decides a window. If you're watching the ticker hover right at the line near the close, expect the result to be judged on the exchange's last trade at the boundary rather than the last tick you happened to see.
Fees
Live windows use the order book's fees. The side that crosses the spread pays, the resting side is credited a rebate, and nothing is taken at settlement. The rates are in What it costs, and the resting side's schedule is in Market making.
Windows that can't be settled
Occasionally neither exchange gives a usable price for a boundary. Acepyr waits for the feed rather than guessing, and then:
- If nobody held a position in the window, it is voided and cleared away.
- If somebody did hold a position, it is not auto-voided. It is held for an operator to resolve. Cancelling would be a full refund, and a full refund takes the win away from whoever read the move correctly.
Windows don't stick around
Closed windows that no trader ever placed an order on are cleared away after a while. Any window a trader placed an order on is kept, so your settled positions and your record are never swept up by this.
FAQ
Related
- Trading the order book — the one order type, what an order locks, who fills first, and what happens at resolution
- Market making — the resting side, the rebate, and the Provide Liquidity ladder
- The market maker's playbook — the practical guide to quoting both sides
- Overview — the two engines, fees, and how resolution works
Questions
Email auriza@acepyr.com.