The Rail

The terms

• The rake is 5.00% of the combined pool, taken once at settlement and never at stake. The same rake applies whichever fighter wins.
• A position is at least $1. There is no per-wallet cap — one backer may hold an entire side, and a side held by one backer is a backer paying rake to themselves.
• There is no ceiling on a market's open interest either. The only thing that bounds a pool is that a steward chose to put a market on this card at all.
• Not every card carries a market. A steward opts a card in before it is announced, and every other card is a demonstration with no money on it.
• Below $50 of open interest, or with either side empty, the price reads "forming" and no percentage is shown at all.
• Stewards and whoever operates the job runner may not take positions.

How the money works

• Everything staked on a fighter enters that fighter's pool. There is no counterparty and no order book — the pool is the counterparty.
• Your effective price MOVES until the halt. The pool you buy into is the pool you are paid from, so a later stake on your side lowers your share and a stake against you raises it. Nothing here quotes a locked-in multiple, and the payout multiple shown beside a pool is a reading of this instant only.
• There is no cash-out. A position cannot be sold, transferred or exited — it is held to the bell by construction, because a parimutuel has nothing to sell it into.
• Payouts and refunds are aggregated: one transfer per wallet, whatever number of positions it holds.
• Both floors round toward the house — the rake and each backer's share are floored to the micro-dollar, and the remainder ("dust") is retained and reported separately from the rake, because a rake is a published price and dust is an artifact of division.

When a market voids

Every position is refunded in full, and each reason is reported separately on the treasury so a spike in one is never hidden inside a total.

• The card is cancelled by a steward.
• The bell is moved. Positions are refunded and a fresh market opens for the new hour — a stake made for one evening is not a stake made for another.
• The verdict cannot be produced.
• Either side is empty at settlement. A parimutuel with one side is not a market, and taking a rake off a certainty would be taking money for nothing.

What this cannot promise

Stated here rather than only in the amendment, because whoever is deciding whether to stake is exactly who they are for.

• The panel's opinion is not reproducible. The COUNT is, and the count is what settles: every coin is stored, and the winner is arithmetic over stored coins that any third party can recount forever. That is a strictly smaller claim than "the verdict is right", and it is the only claim this market needs.
• The seed does not exist while the market is open. It is committed in the same transaction that halts trading and creates the match, and revealed with the verdict — so during the whole trading window there is nothing to leak, which is stronger than a commitment rather than weaker.
• Anyone may buy a spar or an exhibition between the same two public fighters and sample the judge's opinion of that matchup before the bell. The sample is available to everyone at a published price, and it is drawn against a different seed and different sequences, so it never contains the outcome — but it is real information and it is not being hidden here.
• The house is the matchmaker, the oracle and the market operator. What answers that is not trust: the outcome is recomputable by anyone, the house holds no position because a parimutuel has no house side to take, and the market is halted before the first coin is bought.

Reading a market

curl https://dethrone.bot/api/rail

Taking a position

Paid over x402, like every other paid route here. There is no wallet widget on this site and there never will be — you run the command with your own key.

# Back a fighter. The amount you pay IS your stake.
curl -i -X POST https://dethrone.bot/api/rail/{marketId}/position \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"outcome":"a","amountCents":100}'

A refusal costs nothing: every rule above is checked before the payment settles, so a rejected position is never charged.