Buying and selling is the surface. Underneath sit three actions that bypass the book entirely: turn $1 into a full set, turn a full set back into $1, and after settlement turn the winner back into money. They explain why price must equal probability, and why your winnings do not arrive on their own.
| Action | Does | Available | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| split | $1 → one of every outcome token | any time | fixed $1 |
| merge | a full set → $1 | any time | fixed $1 |
| redeem | the winning token → $1 | only after settlement | fixed $1 |
All three share one property: the rate is hard-coded and the market cannot move it. They are contract calls, not trades — no counterparty, no slippage, no trading fee (only gas).
Split and merge are bidirectional and always available, and that alone pins the price.
So you never have to trust the claim that price represents probability — arbitrageurs hold it there. That lane is picked clean; I censused it and found zero live opportunity inventory. The value to you is not the trade, it is that you can read price as probability safely.
Paying $1 for a set where only one piece will be worth anything sounds pointless. Two real uses:
| Use | How |
|---|---|
| You want to sell a side with no bid | split a set, sell the side you do not want, keep the side you do — a "buy" executed as a sell |
| You want to quote both sides | standard for makers: split, then post offers on both |
The first occasionally matters for ordinary traders: when the bid side is thin and the ask side is deep, split-and-sell can beat buying directly. Do the arithmetic rather than assuming a direct buy is always best.
Hold 100 YES and 100 NO and those 100 sets are already worth exactly $100, whatever happens. Merging takes that $100 now, without waiting for settlement.
For makers this is the core loop: quote both sides, accumulate matched inventory, merge it to free capital for the next round. The matched part is locked profit; the unmatched part is the entire risk — that leftover is the naked leg, and it is where market making actually lives or dies.
The activity feed carries a MERGE row — you do not need to infer it.
(I originally believed otherwise; this corrects my own earlier note.)
So when profiling a market-making wallet, count trades, merges and redemptions separately. Looking only at trades blends locked-in matched profit with still-open naked risk.
After settlement the winning ticket is worth $1 — but it is a ticket. Redeeming converts it into a balance.
① The interface shows the position "worth" $1. That is a valuation, not a balance.
② The losing side zeroes and disappears, leaving no record — so reading the feed flatters you. Measured once at 8× off: 589 shares evaporated.
③ The "redeemable" field is not trustworthy. Once the book empties after close, the API may flag both sides redeemable. Judging outcomes from it is simply wrong — see the redeemable trap.
"Did I win" has exactly one reliable answer, and it is settlement itself rather than any convenience field derived from price:
| Why it is better | |
|---|---|
| It is the settlement | not inferred from price, volume or a helper flag |
| Unaffected by an empty book | no quotes, cold market, does not matter |
| Independently verifiable | public on-chain; reproduce it on any settled market |
| No threshold to pick | greater than zero wins, equal to zero loses |
Switching my redemption logic to read those two values eliminated the misjudgements. Re-checking history with it, agreement with market settlement was 100% (207:0 on the disputed windows, and 31:0 on a second batch).
Trading decides what you hold; these three decide what it is worth and when it becomes money. Only redemption requires you — and it sits last in the sequence, after you have stopped paying attention.
MERGE type directly.
This corrects an earlier note of mine.