How 5-minute Bitcoin prediction markets work

A five-minute contract is over before an ordinary catalogue crawl finishes. Almost every design decision in this product follows from that single fact: how the markets are discovered, how they are priced, how they settle, and why the reference price has to be exactly right rather than approximately right.

The window, and the price to beat

Each contract covers a fixed five-minute window and asks one question: at the end of it, is the asset above or below a reference price captured at the open? That captured number is the price to beat. It is locked when the window opens and never changes afterwards, which is what makes the contract legible. A strike that moved during the window would make the question unanswerable.

Why the reference feed has to be the settlement feed

The obvious way to show a live crypto price is to pull a public spot feed. On a five-minute contract that is a trap. If the number on screen comes from one source and the number that settles the contract comes from another, they will disagree, usually by very little and occasionally by enough to decide the outcome. A customer watching a price cross the strike and then losing is a support problem you cannot answer.

The price a customer watches has to be the price that settles the contract. Not a similar one, not a faster one. The same one.

Parity's fast markets take the authoritative Chainlink 60-second TWAP, the same reference the contract settles against, and stream the observations as they arrive. Every point plotted is a real observation: nothing is interpolated to smooth a gap, and no point is drawn outside the window it belongs to. A sparse line is a truthful line.

Rollover

Windows are continuous: as one closes the next opens, with a new strike captured at that boundary. A well-built surface makes that transition without a reload and without carrying anything across it: the previous window's line, its strike and its odds all belong to a contract that no longer exists.

There is a brief moment at each boundary when the new window has one observation and cannot yet be drawn as a line. Showing that honestly is better than the alternative, which is inventing points to fill it.

Settlement

When the window closes the contract is decided by the same 60-second TWAP, and the outcome comes from the venue rather than being computed locally. Until it is published the market is settling, which is a real state and one worth showing plainly rather than leaving the page looking stuck.

The product page covers the surface an operator can embed, and crypto prediction markets covers the wider catalogue these sit inside.