Take the thin side, so the case can pay.

This is risk capital. The vault takes the thin side of cases, and a side is often thin because the people who know how a case ends are on the other one. What a losing side staked is gone.

Terms

The thin side

The vault only ever takes the thinner side of a case. A side is often thin because the people who know how the case ends are on the other one, so expect some backed sides to lose, and what a losing side staked is gone.

Caps

At most 500 USDG or 5% of the vault on one case, whichever is smaller, and at most half of the vault in open cases at once. The rest sits in dollars.

The weekly roll

Deposits and withdrawals wait for the roll, once a week, after every backed case has settled. Everyone who joins or leaves that week gets the same price, so nobody can buy into a win or leave ahead of a loss.

Withdrawals never pause

The pause stops deposits and new backing, and nothing else. Cancelling a queued deposit, requesting a withdrawal, leaving the instant reserve and withdrawing always work.

Who picks the cases

A server key running the published backing policy, and only inside the contract’s rules: a dollar case from the factory, still open, settling before the roll. It cannot withdraw anything or touch the queue.

No APR or yield is published here. What backers earn depends on fees not yet paid and verdicts not yet reached; what past rolls priced a share at is shown instead, read from the contract.

Instant markets, if you opt in

Opting in is per deposit

When you tick “opt in” on a deposit, 2% of it goes to the vault’s instant reserve and the other 98% goes into the vault like any plain deposit. A plain deposit puts nothing in the reserve, and nothing that happens in instant markets can move a plain deposit by a cent or make it wait.

What the reserve does

It funds a sleeve that takes the thinner side of instant markets, the markets that settle 10 to 30 minutes after a launch. It stakes only against real stakes already on the other side, one to one, never past even, and never in a market’s last 20 seconds. The developer being watched often decides these markets, so expect the sleeve to lose more often than it wins.

The most you can lose

Each week the sleeve may use at most a quarter of the reserve and at most $300 across everyone, and nothing while last week’s money is still out.

• The most an opted-in deposit can ever lose to instant markets is the 2% it put in the reserve, plus anything the reserve earned for it.
• For $1,000 opted in, that is $20: at most $5 in one vault week, $8.75 in any 7 days and $16.44 in any 30 days.
• With the vault full at its $50,000 cap and everyone opted in, the reserve holds $1,020.41, and all of it together can lose at most $255.10 in a vault week, $446.43 in any 7 days and $813.86 in any 30 days.
• The contract enforces these limits, not the server key that picks the markets.

What it earns

The creator fee of every instant market (0.35% of each market’s stakes, whether or not the sleeve staked there), and whatever the sleeve’s sides win.

Leaving

You can take your reserve share out at any weekly roll, on its own or with the rest. If the sleeve still has money in a market when the week rolls, which should be rare, nobody joins the reserve that week (their 2% comes back to them) and anyone leaving the reserve is paid without that money, which stays with those who remain.

Limits change slowly, and never for money already in

The timelock can change the limits within fixed maximums, with 48 hours’ notice: 5% of new deposits, half the reserve and $1,000 a week. The share of a deposit already made never changes. When a new sleeve is named, it gets nothing until a full weekly roll has passed, so anyone can leave first.

The reserve is not live yet. Opting in opens when the sleeve is deployed, announced 48 hours ahead.