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How settlement works
Settlement is how a prediction market decides which contracts pay out. On GADUIN it is deterministic and publicly verifiable: every market commits to a named public data source when it opens, and once the event has happened the market resolves automatically from that source — no house, no adjuster, and no discretion.
In a real-money market, settlement is the part that has to be beyond dispute. If the people running the market could decide outcomes, the price would mean nothing. GADUIN removes that risk by reading each result from public tracking data that anyone can check.
The three-step model
1. Commit to a public data source
When a market opens, it locks to a specific public data source and the exact query that will resolve it — for a flight, the ADS-B record for that aircraft and scheduled arrival; for a train, the National Rail running record for that service. The source and the resolution rule are fixed at activation and shown on the market page, and they cannot be changed after the first trade.
2. The event happens
Trading continues until the market closes, usually at the scheduled time of the event. Prices move as new information arrives — weather, congestion, a cancelled upstream service — and each price is the market-implied probability of the outcome. After close, no new trades are accepted and the market waits for the data.
3. The market settles automatically
Once the public source publishes the result, GADUIN's ingest pipeline reads it and resolves the market. Winning contracts pay $1 each; losing contracts pay $0. Payout is automatic and appears in your transfers — there is no claim to file and no operator to convince.
The data behind each market
Each vertical settles from a public feed built for exactly this kind of measurement: public ADS-B transponder data for flights, Great Britain's National Rail running data for trains, and AIS vessel positions with IMF PortWatch throughput for ships and maritime chokepoints. The public data that settles our markets covers each source in detail.
When the data is ambiguous
Public feeds occasionally have gaps — a cancelled service, a missing record, or conflicting reports. When an outcome cannot be read unambiguously, the market moves to a disputed state and a human reviewer resolves it within 24 hours against the same public evidence. This is the rare exception, not the mechanism.
Why it matters
Public-data settlement is what makes the price meaningful. There is no counterparty deciding whether you were right and no adjuster weighing a claim — the outcome is a published measurement. That is also why these markets are easy for software to trust: an agent can read the same source and verify the result independently. New to the mechanics? See what an event contract is.