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.
Acepyr is a prediction market. You buy and sell shares on outcomes, and the market's price becomes the forecast. When many people put $ACEPYR behind their reads, the price the market settles on is a signal in its own right — a number reflecting what the crowd, weighted by conviction, actually expects.
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.
Reading the price
A market's price is a probability in disguise. A share pays out $1.00 if its side is correct and $0.00 if it isn't, so the current price reads directly as the market's estimate of the odds.
| Price | What it means |
|---|---|
| $0.25 | The market thinks there's roughly a 25% chance |
| $0.50 | Coin flip: the market is undecided |
| $0.75 | The market thinks it's likely (75% chance) |
The two sides always add up to $1.00. If YES is trading at $0.62, NO is trading at $0.38 — they are two views of the same number, not two independent prices.
The payoff follows from that. Say you buy a YES share at $0.55:
| Outcome | Settles at | Your result |
|---|---|---|
| It happens | $1.00 | Profit $0.45 per share |
| It does not | $0.00 | Lose your $0.55 |
A fee comes off when you trade, and nothing comes off at settlement — see Fees below.
Two engines, one product
Every market sells the same thing: a share that pays $1.00 if its side is right. But two different machines fill your order, and which one you're on changes how it feels to trade and what your payout is actually guaranteed to be. This is the single most useful thing to understand about Acepyr, so it's worth a minute.
| Order book | Curve | |
|---|---|---|
| You trade against | Another trader | A pricing formula |
| Your order fills | When someone crosses your price | Instantly, always |
| Exiting a position | A resting sell order — needs a buyer | Sell straight back to the pool |
| A winning share pays | Exactly $1.00 | Up to $1.00, shared from what's in the pot |
| Which markets | Set per market, when it is listed. Every Live window is on it | None open today |
How to tell which one you're on. An order-book market shows a real book — bids and asks resting as actual orders, placed by traders and by the venue, and a panel listing your own resting orders. A curve market shows a depth ladder too, but that ladder is generated from the formula: it's a preview of what different order sizes would cost you, not other people's orders waiting to trade.
How the order book works
The order book is a matched-pair CLOB — a central limit order book where every share is fully backed by a dollar of collateral. Whether a market runs on it is decided when the market is listed. Trading the order book is the full operating detail; what follows is the shape of it.
You place a limit order
There is only one order type: a limit order. A "market buy" button is just a limit order priced through the book with a slippage cap, so you can never fill worse than your limit. If you bid $0.77 you pay $0.77 or less — a worse fill is structurally impossible, not merely unlikely.
Your order is escrowed
Placing an order locks the money behind it. A buy locks $ACEPYR; a sell locks the shares you're selling. You cannot quote a price you can't back, which is what makes every resting order in the book a real, costly opinion rather than a bluff.
It matches, or it rests
The book looks for the best price you can get, and breaks ties in favour of the order that has been waiting longest. If nothing crosses your price, your order simply rests until someone else's order reaches it — or until you cancel it, or its expiry passes.
It settles at $1.00 or $0.00
When the market resolves, winning shares pay $1.00 and losing shares pay $0.00.
The part that makes the dollar guarantee real. There are exactly three ways two orders can meet:
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| A buyer and a seller of the same side agree on a price | The share changes hands. Cash goes to the seller, the share goes to the buyer. No new shares are created. |
| Two buyers on opposite sides cross — say a YES bid at $0.60 and a NO bid at $0.45, adding to more than $1.00 | A brand-new pair of shares is created, and exactly $1.00 goes into the market's reserve. Each buyer gets the side they bid on. This is the only way shares are ever created. |
| Two sellers on opposite sides cross | The pair is retired and exactly $1.00 comes back out of the reserve. |
Because a share can only be born by someone depositing a full dollar for the pair, the market's reserve always holds exactly $1.00 for every outstanding pair. That is why a winning share on an order-book market redeems for the full $1.00 rather than a scaled-down share of whatever happens to be left.
One consequence worth planning for: an exit is a sell order, and a sell order needs a counterparty. If nobody is bidding, your position doesn't sell — it rests. On a thin book that can mean waiting, or lowering your price.
How the curve works
The curve is an automated market maker — a constant-product formula (an FPMM, the same family as Gnosis and Polymarket's early markets) that quotes both sides at once and always takes the other side of your trade.
- You always get filled. There's no counterparty to wait for. Buying pushes the price up, selling pushes it down, and a larger order moves it further — the price impact is the cost of size.
- Exiting is instant. You sell back to the pool at the current formula price.
- The two sides always sum to $1.00, exactly as on the book.
A curve payout is not guaranteed to be $1.00 per share
The pool is a quoter, not a bank. It prices as though there is deep liquidity behind it, but the only real money in the market is what traders themselves paid in. If the flow ran heavily toward the side that ends up winning, the pot can be smaller than the winners' combined face value — and payouts are then scaled down pro-rata so the market pays out exactly what it holds and never more.
This is not theoretical; it has happened on Acepyr's curve markets. It is why the order book was built. Live windows trade on the book, and no market open today runs on the curve.
Liquidity, and how to add it
Liquidity means: can you get filled, at a sensible price, in the size you want?
On the order book, liquidity is resting orders. There is no pool to deposit into, no LP token, and no yield product. Depth comes from the orders people rest, plus a ladder of buy orders the venue places on both sides when a book market is listed. On Live windows that ladder is re-priced as the price moves.
That also means you can be the one supplying it. A market page's order menu has a Provide Liquidity option, which places a two-sided ladder of resting buy orders around the current mid — you choose a budget, how wide of the mid to start, how many price levels to stack, and how long the quotes stay up before expiring.
Here is how quoting pays. You rest a buy of YES at $0.48 and a buy of NO at $0.48. If both fill you hold a complete pair that cost you $0.96, and a complete pair redeems for $1.00 whichever way the market goes. The four cents are the spread, and they are yours. On top of that, a resting order that fills is credited a rebate rather than charged a fee.
The risk in quoting both sides
If only one of your two legs fills, you don't hold a matched pair — you hold a directional position, exposed to the outcome, at whatever price you quoted. Quoting is not a market-neutral free lunch, and one-sided fills are common on a thin book. Your budget is also locked in escrow the whole time the quotes rest, and is released as they fill, expire, or are cancelled.
Market making carries the rebate schedule, the ladder tool's settings, and what the book's structure gives a quoter. The market maker's playbook is the practical guide to doing it well.
On the curve, you can't add liquidity. A curve market's pool is seeded once, when the market is created, and there is no deposit path — no user-facing way to add to it or withdraw from it.
A note on the liquidity figure shown on market cards
On an order-book market, the liquidity number attached to a market is the figure it was opened with — it is not a reading of the depth resting in the book right now. To see the real depth, look at the order book itself. Books can be thin: beyond the venue's own ladder, the depth is only ever what traders have chosen to rest, and the venue's ladder can be bought through.
Maker and taker
In an order book there are two roles in every trade. The maker is whoever placed the order that was sitting there waiting. The taker is whoever came along and crossed it. The taker gets immediacy; the maker gets to name their price and wait.
The taker pays the trading fee. The maker is credited a rebate. That asymmetry is the standing incentive to rest orders rather than always cross the spread, and combined with the pair-building income above it is a market maker's edge on Acepyr. Market making has the full schedule, the cap that funds the rebate, and what it costs to quote.
Fees
One fee, charged when you trade. It is not a flat percentage. It is largest on a market trading near even money and falls away toward both ends, so crossing an uncertain market costs the most and crossing a nearly-settled one costs very little:
| Fill price | The taker pays | The maker is credited |
|---|---|---|
| $0.50 | 0.80% | 0.50% |
| $0.25 or $0.75 | 0.60% | 0.38% |
| $0.10 or $0.90 | 0.29% | 0.18% |
| $0.05 or $0.95 | 0.15% | 0.10% |
| $0.01 or $0.99 | 0.03% | 0.02% |
The fee is charged on the value of the fill, so a bigger position costs proportionally more to open. On the curve there is no resting side for the pool to credit, so every curve trade is a taker trade and the left-hand column is what it costs.
Nothing is taken at settlement. A winning share credits the full $1.00, and a refund from a cancelled market is untouched. What you paid when you traded is the whole of it.
This schedule can change
The rates above are the schedule in force now, not a commitment. They are set deliberately and can be moved. Check this page rather than a number you wrote down.
How resolution works
A market settles against something outside anyone's opinion — a result, a published number, a price print — never against a model's view of what should have happened.
The market reaches its close
Every market carries a closing condition: a time, a scheduled data release, or the end of a rolling window.
A resolver reads the answer
Each market carries a resolution instruction that says exactly where the answer comes from, written when the market is listed. The markets running today read a price feed at a specific moment. Meta-markets, which read their own hidden vote, are built but not currently available to trade. A background job checks every open market on a short cycle, so resolution doesn't wait on anyone being at a desk.
The outcome is applied
Shares on the winning side pay $1.00 each and shares on the losing side pay $0.00. Payouts come out of the market's reserve — the money traders themselves put in. The system never pays out more than the market holds.
If it can't be resolved, it isn't guessed
If the deciding data never arrives, the market is not settled to an invented outcome. Depending on the case it is either voided — with every position refunded at what you paid for it — or held for an operator to resolve against the market's stated criteria. A market with real money in it is never auto-voided just because a feed was late, precisely because a refund would take the win away from whoever read it correctly.
Markets are listed by Acepyr; creation is not open to the public. Resolution and cancellation by an operator are restricted to senior admin accounts and run through exactly the same settlement code as automatic resolution — there is no separate manual payout path.
Markets that ask a qualitative question
Most prediction markets can only ask questions the world will eventually answer for you. Acepyr has also built markets on questions with no objective answer — what a group actually believes, where consensus really sits. They are not currently available to trade.
These are meta-markets, and they work by measuring the crowd directly: a free, blind, one-per-person vote runs alongside the tradeable market, the vote stays hidden while the market is open, and the market settles against where the vote actually landed. You're not predicting the news; you're reading the room.
FAQ
Questions
Email auriza@acepyr.com.