How it works

1. 1

   You stake into a pool

   Picking a side moves $HP out of your balance and into that outcome’s pool. That is the entire transaction. There is no house taking the other side, no order book matching you against a maker, and no counterparty who has to stay solvent for you to get paid. You are pooled with everyone else who picked the same side.

2. 2

   Winners split the whole pool

   When the market resolves, the pools for every losing outcome are added to the pool for the winning one, and everyone who backed the winner takes a slice pro-rata by their share of the winning pool, minus a 0.5% burn. Losing stakes are what pays the winners. There is nowhere else the money could come from.

3. 3

   The book is solvent by construction

   Payouts are a division of money that has already been staked, so they can never exceed it. A parimutuel book cannot take a bad position, cannot be squeezed and has no exposure to hedge — which is exactly why it is the right model to put on-chain first. What you are exposed to is the outcome, not the venue.

Nothing here sets a price. An outcome holding 40% of the market pool is priced at 40¢, and it pays roughly 2.49× — one divided by its pool share, less the burn. Odds move because money moves, not because a market maker moved them.

Because the two sides are shares of one pool, they always sum to 100¢. A price of 40¢ is the market saying it is willing to pay 2.49× on that side — which is the same statement as “about a 40% chance”, read off the money rather than off an opinion.

This is the part parimutuel interfaces most often hide. Your stake joins the pool you are about to share in, so it dilutes your own slice of it. Stake 10,000 HP into a 40,000 pool and you now own 20% of a bigger pool, not 25% of the old one.

The bet slip quotes the multiple after your stake is included — 2.19× in the example below, not the 2.49× the card showed before you typed an amount. The card number is the small-stake limit, because a card cannot know what you will stake. The slip number is the one you get.

A binary market with 100,000 HP in the pool, split 40,000 on YES and 60,000 on NO. You stake 10,000 on YES.

Pool before

100,000 HP

YES price before

40,000 ÷ 100,00040¢

Your stake

10,000 on YES

YES pool after

40,000 + 10,00050,000

Market pool after

100,000 + 10,000110,000

YES price after

50,000 ÷ 110,00045¢

Burn at settlement

0.5% of 110,000−550

Distributable

110,000 − 550109,450

Your share of YES

10,000 ÷ 50,00020%

Payout if YES wins

20% × 109,45021,890 HP

Multiple

21,890 ÷ 10,0002.19×

Profit if YES wins

+11,890

If NO wins

your 10,000 funds the NO side0

Every figure above is produced by the same function the bet slip calls. Settlement itself runs the same arithmetic in integer base units and folds the rounding dust into the burn, so distributed plus burned always equals exactly what was staked.

If the winning outcome has an empty pool — nobody backed it — there is no one to divide the money between. Every stake is refunded in full and nothing burns. The same applies when a market voids: the event was cancelled, the token rugged, the data source went dark, or fewer than 2 outcomes were live at resolution. Refund, no burn, no fee.

Voiding is deliberately the safety valve rather than the embarrassing edge case. The only alternative to refunding an unresolvable market is picking a winner arbitrarily, which is worse for everyone holding a position in it.

Platform fee

the protocol keeps nothing0%

Burn

of each settled pool — see $HP0.5%

Spread

there is no order book to crossnone

Minimum stake

blocks dust-spam in the pool ledger100 HP

Maximum stake

stops one wallet owning a thin early pool1,000,000 HP

Gas

paid to the chain, not to usETH

The burn is the whole economic argument for $HP: every resolved market removes supply permanently. More on the token.

Resolution is per-category, and the categories are genuinely not equal. Most of the slate settles from data nobody here controls. One category does not, and it says so.

• Stock TokensChainlink price feed
• CryptoChainlink price feed
• MemecoinsOn-chain DEX TWAP
• The ChainRobinhood Chain explorer
• CultureResolver committeeNot trustless

Stock-token and crypto markets read a Chainlink price feed. Memecoin markets read an on-chain DEX time-weighted average price, which is expensive to manipulate over a resolution window. Chain-metric markets read the explorer’s own counters. Those four settle from sources that do not require you to trust Hood Picks.

Culture markets are resolved by a resolver committee of humans reading the agreed source. There is no oracle for “did this actually happen”, so we do not pretend there is one. Trust the committee or do not take the market — every market states its own resolution rule on its page before you can stake into it.