Using Hunch
How payouts work
Why an early call is paid more, the 1.00× late rule, partial fills and the fee, with the worked example.
In plain words
Everyone’s stake goes into one pool; there is no bookmaker. Two rules decide who gets what:
- The moment a bet lands, it is paid to the people already on the other side, in proportion to their stakes. That money is theirs if their side wins, and nothing that happens later can take it back.
- A bet is accepted only up to what the other side can cover. The other side can take in at most 30 times its own stake in total. Anything beyond that comes back to you.
So if your side wins, you are paid your accepted stake plus your share of every opposing dollar that arrived after you, shared with the people who were already on your side when it arrived, in proportion to stake. Losing bets are paid nothing. Bet late and you get your stake back plus whatever the other side adds after you. Bet early and you collect more.
The arithmetic is one running total per side; the For the curious section of How it works has it in full, including the formula s · (1 + A(T) − A(entry)).
The worked example
A weekly NVDA market with made-up bettors, replayed with the contract’s own arithmetic. Hunch lists it with 10 USDG on each side, and NVDA closes up. The fee is left out here.
| When (ET) | Who | Side | Stake (USDG) |
|---|---|---|---|
| At listing | Hunch seed | UP and DOWN | 10.00 + 10.00 |
| Tue 9:35 am | Mei | UP | 20.00 |
| Tue 12:00 pm | Dan | DOWN | 30.00 |
| Thu 11:00 am | Kim | DOWN | 40.00 |
| Fri 3:55 pm | Ben | UP | 50.00 |
| Fri 3:58 pm | Lee | DOWN | 10.00 |
| Position | Stake | Hunch pays | Multiple | Ordinary pool |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mei (Tuesday) | 20.00 | 69.16 | 3.45× | 42.50 |
| Ben (Friday, 5 min before the bell) | 50.00 | 56.25 | 1.12× | 106.25 |
| Hunch seed, UP side | 10.00 | 44.58 | 4.45× | 21.25 |
| Total paid to UP | 169.99 | 170.00 |
It only goes up
What a bet would be paid if its side won right now can only rise while the market is open. A later bet on your side does not dilute you (it shares only in what arrives after it), and a later bet on the other side adds to you. The market page shows this number for every position: “If UP wins now: 23.40 USDG · was 20.00 when you bet.”
If UP wins, what Mei and Ben are paid, after each bet
IllustrationThe late bet: 1.00×
A bet placed a moment before the bell, with nothing arriving after it, wins exactly its stake back: 1.00×. That is the design. It is what lets a market stay open until the closing bell instead of locking early to stop sniping: sniping pays nothing. A late bet is not harmed either; it is simply not paid for information everyone already had.
In the example, Ben bet 50.00 UP five minutes before the bell. One DOWN bet came after him, so he is paid 56.25. In an ordinary pool he would have taken 106.25, most of it from people who called it days earlier.
Partial fills
Each side can take in at most 30 times its own stake from the other side, in total. Right after listing, the DOWN side holds the 10 USDG seed, so it can absorb 300, of which 10 is already used by the seed’s own UP half: the first UP bet can be accepted up to 290. A bet of 400 would be accepted 290 and 110 would be returned. With the beta limit of 25 USDG per bet and a limit of 30× this should be rare, but the bet panel always quotes “Accepted now” before you sign.
Bets that land within the same Ethereum block (about 12 seconds on Robinhood Chain) are matched together as one batch: they are rationed pro rata on the amounts offered, against the room as it stood when the batch began, and they never pay each other. So the order of transactions inside a batch buys nothing.
The returned part can be withdrawn from the next block on. You do not have to: Hunch’s keeper sends it back automatically, usually within minutes, and anyone can send it sooner. It always goes to you. The position shows it plainly, for example “110 USDG returned (the other side could only cover 290)”.
The fee
Hunch keeps 2% of a winner’s gain, the payout minus the stake, taken when the payout is sent. There is no fee on your stake, on refunds, on refunded markets, on losing bets, or on any part of a bet that was returned.
| Winner | Paid | Gain | Fee | Received |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mei | 69.16 | 49.16 | 0.98 | 68.18 |
| Ben | 56.25 | 6.25 | 0.12 | 56.12 |
Fees collect inside the contract and anyone can sweep them to the treasury Safe. The sweep is separate from payouts on purpose: a transfer to the treasury can never make a payout fail.
Rounding and leftovers
The contract divides with floor rounding, in USDG’s 6 decimals, so nobody is ever paid a fraction more than the pool holds. This site shows money to the cent and never rounds a payout up: the contract pays Mei 69.166666 USDG and the site shows 69.16.
Every dollar in is paid out: payouts add up to the pool. The rounding leaves a few millionths of a USDG at most (1 millionth in the example), which goes to the treasury Safe.
Hunch’s opening seed
Hunch lists every market with 1 USDG on each side. The two halves are each other’s first counterparties, so the seed gets back at least what it put in whichever side wins; that is why Hunch can open every ticker every day. The seed is small on purpose, so that bettors, not the seed, earn most of the early money. It appears in every book as “Hunch opening seed”, and Hunch’s wallets are never counted as bettors.
The ordinary-pool comparison
After a market settles, its book shows one more column: what an ordinary pool would have paid each winner, which is the pool divided by the winning side’s stakes, times your stake. It is worked out off-chain from the same bets, for comparison only; the contract pays by the rule above.