Resolution & Settlement

Settlement moves real money irreversibly - resolveMarket is final - so Aetheria's resolver is built around one principle: when anything is ambiguous, refuse and escalate to a human. Never guess.

Both behaviors have already happened in production. The resolver settled "TSLA closes above $340 on 2026-08-14" autonomously from the official Nasdaq close ($342.27 → YES, tx)

• and in the same pass it refused an RWA market whose reading landed 0.3% from its threshold, listing it for human review instead. Both are the system working as designed.

The gauntlet: what a market must pass to auto-settle

Every ended market runs through this checklist. Failing any item routes it to the manual queue with the reason logged:

1. Category is machine-resolvable (PULSE, RWA, or EQUITY)
2. Creator is allowlisted - createMarket is permissionless, so anyone could craft a title that pattern-matches an adapter; only venue-authored markets auto-settle
3. Comparator is a plain "above X" (or the synonym "exceeds X") - any negation or unusual comparator ("below", "at least", "won't") refuses
4. Exactly one metric adapter matches the title - zero is unresolvable, two is ambiguous; both refuse
5. The threshold parses exactly. The parser reads standard magnitude notation ($45M, 50K, $27.5 billion, $12bn, $50MM) and returns null - refusal - on anything it cannot read exactly. This matters more than it looks: a naive regex reads "$12bn" as 12 and settles a market three orders of magnitude off
6. Freshness or session-dating, depending on the metric type (below)
7. The reading clears the dispute band - a result within 1% of the threshold (0.05% for official exchange closes) is too close to auto-settle on an approximating source, and goes to a human

Live metrics vs dated readings

Adapters return one of two shapes, and the guards differ:

Live metrics (TVL sums, 24h volume) answer "what is the value now". A late pass would read a drifted value, so live metrics only settle within a staleness bound (default 2h) of the market's close.

Dated readings (an official daily close) answer "what was the value for session X" - a fixed historical figure that cannot drift, so staleness does not apply. Instead, session-dating rules are strict:

• The reading's exchange-local session date must equal the date named in the market's title (falling back to the close date). Earlier means the deciding session hasn't printed - wait. Later means the window was missed
  • human review. Both directions are safe
• A candle from a session still in progress carries the live price in its close field; the equity adapter discards it and only ever returns completed sessions, failing closed if the trading-period metadata is missing

The metric adapters

Two deliberate exclusions worth understanding: titles saying "DEX volume" never match the volume adapter, because CoinGecko's number is all-venue (CEX-dominated) and settling a DEX question against it would be factually wrong. And "trades above" never matches the equity adapter, because that is a touch condition an intraday high can satisfy while the close does not - the adapter only answers close-based questions.

The escape hatch: no market is ever stuck

If a market sits unsettled for 7 days past close - lost owner key, abandoned operator, a question nothing can resolve - anyone may call:

function forceCancelStale(uint256 marketId) external

It flips the market to Cancelled, making every stake fully refundable via claimPayout. It is safe to leave permissionless because cancelling can only ever refund - it cannot move value between participants. The app surfaces this on every closed-unsettled market: first the date after which no key is needed, then the button itself.

This converts the venue's trust assumption from "trust the operator forever" into "trust the operator for seven days" - see Trust Model.

The manual queue

Everything the resolver refuses is logged with its reasons and appears in the owner's UI with RESOLVE YES / RESOLVE NO / CANCEL controls (gated until trading ends; a side with no stake cannot be declared winner - the contract would cancel-and-refund instead, and the UI says so rather than letting the button surprise you).