Parimutuel Markets
Aetheria's venue is parimutuel - the pooled-stake structure used by racetrack totes for over a century, not the order-book structure Polymarket uses. Understanding this one design choice explains most of the venue's behavior.
The mechanics
Every market has exactly two pots. Betting YES sends native OKB into
yesPool; betting NO into noPool. Your stake is recorded against your
address. That's the entire market state - no order book, no AMM curve, no
shares to price.
Implied odds are just the pool ratio. If YES holds 100 OKB and NO holds 50, the market implies 67% YES. Nobody quotes that price; it is arithmetic on what people have staked.
Where winning money comes from: the losers
On resolution, winners get their own stake back plus a pro-rata share of the losing pool, minus a 2% protocol fee taken from the losing pool only:
payout = stake + stake × (losePool − 2%) / winPool
Worked example - 100 OKB on YES, 50 OKB on NO, resolves YES:
| Losing pool | 50 OKB |
| Protocol fee (2% of losers) | 1 OKB |
| Distributed to winners | 49 OKB |
| A 10 OKB YES staker (10% of the YES pool) | receives 10 + 4.9 = 14.9 OKB |
| Every NO staker | receives nothing |
The books always balance exactly: 100 returned + 49 redistributed + 1 fee = 150 staked. No house money is ever at risk and no counterparty can default - the venue is structurally incapable of insolvency. That is the property you buy with the parimutuel design.
What you pay for that property
Two trade-offs, stated plainly because the app states them too:
Your payout ratio is not fixed at entry. The estimate quoted on your ticket uses pool sizes right now; your actual payout is set by the pools at close. If more stake piles onto your side after you bet, your share of the losing pool shrinks. Early contrarians who are right still profit - but less than the moment-of-entry quote suggested. The ticket labels every estimate "at current pools" for exactly this reason.
Positions cannot be sold before resolution. There is no secondary market; capital is locked from bet to settlement. Two design decisions soften this: most venue-authored markets are short-dated (24h PULSE/EQUITY markets, so lock-up is hours), and the DEX hedge leg lets you adjust exposure in spot even while the outcome position is frozen.
Refunds - every path out
claimPayout pays in three situations, and the contract guarantees one of
them is always eventually reachable:
| Situation | What you get |
|---|---|
| Market resolved, you backed the winner | stake + share of losing pool (−2% fee) |
| Market cancelled (by owner, or one-sided at resolution) | full refund of everything you staked, both sides |
| Market unsettled 7 days past close | anyone may call forceCancelStale → full refund |
A one-sided market (nobody backed the winning side) automatically cancels rather than resolving, so "the winner takes an empty pool" can never happen
- everyone is simply refunded.
Liquidity: every bet is the liquidity
There are no liquidity providers because there is nothing to provide liquidity to - the pools are the sum of the bets. The cold-start problem (nobody wants to bet into an empty market) is handled by the market-maker agent, which seeds both sides of fresh markets at AI-estimated fair odds.
Two things make that honest rather than cosmetic: the agent takes real parimutuel positions - its losing-side stakes pay winners like anyone else's, so depth provision has real, bounded cost (inventory risk under a hard budget cap) - and it trades only on the venue, never on OKX DEX, so it can never manufacture wash volume.