How to use Fanket

Markets, shares and prices

Every market is a question with a fixed set of outcomes — Yes/No, or several named ones. You trade shares of an outcome: a share pays exactly 1 USDC if that outcome wins, and 0 if it loses.

Because a share pays 1.00 or nothing, its price is the probability. Yes trading at 34¢ means the market currently gives the event a 34 % chance — and prices No near 66¢, since the pair always adds up to about 1.00.

Buy low, be right, collect 1.00 — that is the whole game. You can also sell early at the current price; nobody has to hold to the end.

How the order book works

The book is two lists facing each other: bids (offers to buy, best price on top) and asks (offers to sell, best price on the bottom of its stack). Your order joins the list at its price and waits.

A trade happens when a bid and an ask cross. At the same price, whoever arrived first trades first — price first, time second.

Yes and No are two sides of one book: your buy of Yes at 60¢ can match someone buying No at 40¢. Together you fund a full 1.00 pair, and the platform issues one share to each of you — nobody needs to already own shares for the market to run.

What the spread is

The spread is the gap between the best bid and the best ask. A book showing 45¢ bid / 48¢ ask has a 3¢ spread.

A tight spread means a liquid market with plenty of orders; a wide spread means an empty one. The spread is what impatience costs: trade right now and you accept the other side’s price, wait with your own order and someone crosses to you.

Market vs limit orders

A limit order names your price and waits in the book until someone takes it — or until you cancel. It may never fill; that is the cost of choosing the price.

A market order does not wait: it takes the best prices already in the book, walking deeper if your size is larger than the top level. Instant, but at whatever the book offers.

Rule of thumb: limit orders make the market, market orders take it.

Creating a market

Anyone can create a market: a clear question, a close time, a resolution time, and a rule that says how it settles. Publishing costs 2 USDC; a search-promo slot is an optional 10 USDC on top.

The platform settles the outcome against your rule — you never settle your own market. Write the rule so a stranger could verify it from a public source. Dates and times in a rule are read in UTC unless the rule names another zone, and the creation form takes its dates in UTC too, with your local time under each field. Everywhere else the interface shows every deadline in your own time zone and labels it.

You earn 2 % of what winners make on your market, so a clear question that people want to trade is literally worth money.

Seeding the book

A newborn market has an empty book: no orders, no price, nothing to show on the card. Until two orders meet, “the market thinks X %” simply does not exist.

Seeding fixes that. You post the first two orders yourself — one buying Yes, one buying No — centred on the chance you pick and 2¢ apart, so the market opens with a real bid and ask around your estimate.

Seed money is locked, not spent. Orders that fill become a normal position; whatever does not fill you can cancel and take back.

Why 2–98 % and never 100 %

Prices live strictly between 0 and 1.00. An order at 0¢ pays nothing and asks nothing — it is not an order; a share at 1.00 has nothing left to win. No quote may push a price onto those walls.

Your seed places each side 1¢ inside the chance you pick: at 55 % it bids Yes at 54¢ and No at 44¢. At 2 % the Yes bid lands on 1¢ — the lowest price that still exists; below 2 % (or above 98 %) one side of the quote would sit at zero or less. That is the whole reason for the bounds.

The deeper reason: 0 % and 100 % are not predictions, they are facts. A certain outcome has nothing to trade — a market only exists between the extremes. And the two seed prices deliberately sum to 0.98, under 1.00, so your own orders can never match each other.

Close and settlement

Trading stops at the close time: open orders are cancelled and their reserves come back. The outcome is settled at the resolution time the creator set — shortly after the close, or much later when the answer only exists after the last bet, like a match that kicks off after betting closes.

At that point the platform settles the market against its rule: the winning outcome’s shares pay 1 USDC each, everything else goes to zero.

If the question cannot be settled fairly — the source vanished, the event was called off — the market is voided and stakes come back.

Until then your balance splits into available and locked: open orders lock funds, and cancelling an unfilled order releases them instantly.

Ground rules

Ask something a stranger can verify from public information, with one unambiguous answer by the close time.

No markets about private individuals, no deliberately vague wording. Unresolvable or misleading markets are removed before trading opens.

The full contract lives in the Terms — this page is the map, that one is the law.