How Pari works

1. Somebody asks a question

A market is a question with between two and ten outcomes and a time it locks. That is the whole object. "Will we ship on Friday?" with Yes and No. "Who takes game three?" with one outcome per team.

The question is stored by its hash on chain, so the text on the card and the text the program scored can be checked against each other. The creator also picks who resolves it: a price feed, an on-chain read, an external API, or a named steward.

2. Everyone stakes into one pot

There is no order book and nobody takes the other side of your stake. Everything goes into one pot, split by outcome. If the pot holds 620 on YES and 380 on NO, YES is showing 62%.

That percentage is not a price somebody set. It is the pot, divided. It moves every time anyone stakes, right up to the moment the market locks.

pari-mutuel — A pool where everyone stakes together and the winners split the pot. The name comes from the French for "mutual stake"; it is where Pari gets its name.

3. What you get back

Takeout comes off the pot first: 1% to the protocol and 0.5% to whoever created the market, within bounds the program enforces. What is left is the distributable pot, and it is divided among the winning shares in proportion.

So your payout depends on two things you do not control: how big the pot gets, and how many other people end up on your side. A market where everyone agrees with you pays almost nothing. That is not a flaw; it is what makes the percentage mean something.

4. Your stub

Staking gives you a stub: the outcome, the amount, the lock time, and a reminder that only you can see it. In Discord the reply is ephemeral, so it never appears in the channel.

Before lock you can sell the position back to the pool at its implied value, minus a 2% fee. After lock, nothing moves until the result.

5. The result, and arguing with it

A steward posts the outcome together with its evidence, and a dispute window opens — an hour by default. Anyone can challenge inside the window by posting a bond. A council rules, and the losing bond is slashed.

Feed-resolved markets skip most of this: a price feed reading at a fixed time is checkable by anyone, which is why those markets are labelled differently on the card.

6. Claiming

Winnings are claimed, not pushed. The market vault holds them until you ask, and the claim list carries a badge so you do not forget. This is deliberate: a claim is an action you take, and the program never needs to know where to send anything.

7. What it leaves on your record

Every resolved market you held a position in goes on your record, win or lose. Your form score is a calibration score: it asks how close your allocations were to what happened, not how much you made.

Your edge is the same measurement taken against the pool of the same market, with you removed from the pool first. Positive means you beat the crowd you were standing in. The crowd itself scores exactly zero, by construction.

Early stakes count up to twice as much as late ones, your own markets never count for you, and a market only counts if at least five other people staked on it. Below twenty resolved markets you are provisional and unranked.