Every creator on our platform runs into this question sooner or later.

You create a market. The rules are tight. The topic is interesting. Then you hit the last step and the question is; how much liquidity should I actually seed this with?

The short answer is simple, more seed almost always creates a better market.

But in truth there is a lot more to it than that. Markets are an investment, and investments are about utilizing your capital efficiently. XO Market is built so you don’t need to overcommit just to get started. Different ideas require different starting positions.

So what’s the right amount of liquidity to seed your market with? 

Seeding is Your Starting Position

When you seed a market on XO Market, you’re not “putting money up for grabs.” You’re placing a temporary stake into the pricing curve that allows trading to begin.

Two things are worth grounding early:

• If nobody trades your market, your seed comes back to you at resolution (minus the standard resolution fee).

• If people do trade, your seed circulates through the pool while the market is live, and returns when the market resolves - alongside whatever creator fees the market generated.

Seeding isn’t a bet on the outcome, it’s making the market tradable. And because XO Market uses LS-LMSR, your downside is bounded. Even if trading becomes extremely lopsided, your maximum exposure is capped by what you chose to seed. 

Now if you seed your market 50/50, but you anticipate the odds taking a sharp turn one way or another, you can rebalance your liquidity to reflect what you believe the actual probability of either outcome is, thereby minimizing your exposure. You have to be quick though; traders are always on the lookout for mismatched odds.

So the real question isn’t “what might I lose?”

It’s “what kind of experience do I want early traders to have?”

What Your Seed Changes

XO Market doesn’t match buyers and sellers. There’s no orderbook waiting on the other side of your trade. Every market is priced on the LS-LMSR curve.

That means the price you see is the marginal price - the price of the next tiny unit - not necessarily the average price you’ll pay for a real-sized trade. When someone places a meaningful order, they move along the curve as it executes. The difference between the displayed price and the average fill is odds impact.

Here’s the key dynamic:

• A smaller seed creates a steeper curve.

• A steeper curve means trades move prices more aggressively.

• That shows up as higher odds impact, especially early on.

This isn’t a flaw. Early in a market’s life, very little information has been expressed. Prices should be sensitive. Early conviction should matter.

But sensitivity cuts both ways. If the curve is too steep, early traders feel punished for being first and it holds them back from trading as much volume. And when that happens, they hesitate - or worse, they bounce. So when you seed more, you’re buying something very specific: you’re buying a smoother early phase of the market’s life.

Not the first few minutes, but the first few hours or day - the period where a market is finding its footing, building trust, and signaling whether it’s worth engaging with. That window is where momentum tends to form. So if you’re looking to attract some volume, it’s important.

Why Bigger Seeds Usually Win

It’s tempting to think about seeding purely in terms of expected volume. That’s not quite right.

A higher seed doesn’t guarantee your market goes viral. Some markets won’t. And that’s fine - XO Market is built for the long tail.

What a higher seed does reliably improve is:

• early trade quality

• confidence for the early participants

• willingness for traders to leave positions open instead of in-and-out probing

Those open positions matter more than raw trade count. LS-LMSR deepens as open interest accumulates, not just as trades flash by. When people leave exposure on both sides, those positions grow the pool and odds impact smooths out.

That’s the balance XO Market is designed around: you seed enough to get the market through its fragile early phase, then let the crowd do the rest.

How to Choose Your Seed

Now that you know all the dynamics at play, ask yourself a few questions:

• How broad is the audience for this market? A niche community question doesn’t need the same starting depth as something you’re sharing widely.

• How many outcomes are you listing? LS-LMSR uses one shared pool, so you’re not fragmenting liquidity - but attention still spreads across outcomes early.

• How hot is the timing? Breaking narratives tend to attract larger early trades than slow-burn topics.

• How important is early trader experience for this market? If you want it to feel smooth from the first click, you’ll want to subsidize that experience.

From there, most creators naturally fall into one of three categories (or tiers):

• Small Seed ($500 - $1,000): Some markets are exploratory, meaning smaller seed, higher sensitivity, acceptable early volatility.

• Medium Seed ($1,000 - $5,000): Other markets are “standard launches”, enough seed to feel clean, without overcommitting.

• Large Seed ($5,000+): Finally there are high-conviction pushes, markets you actively want to scale and share.
  

There’s no single right answer. But in almost every case, creators who err slightly on the side of more seed report better engagement than those who cut it too thin.

Setting Your Creator Fee

Once you’ve set your seed, you then set your creator fee. Fees are your upside - a slice of every trade that happens in your market. 

It’s important you set your fee high enough to out-earn any potential losses you might incur due to odds impact. But higher isn’t always better.

In practice, creators who optimize for flow tend to outperform creators who optimize for maximum fee extraction. Lower fees reduce hesitation, invite participation, and compound over time through volume.

The best practice in our experience is a simple heuristic; the more volume you expect your market to have, the lower your fee needs to be and vice versa. But ultimately it’s all up to you.

Seeding with intent

Liquidity is your market’s first signal.

It doesn’t predict whether a market will succeed, but it strongly influences whether traders are willing to engage early, leave positions open, and come back. A higher seed buys you a smoother early phase and a stronger first impression. A smaller seed keeps things accessible, with LS-LMSR designed to deepen the pool naturally as conviction accumulates.

Seed enough that early traders aren’t punished for showing up. Set a fee that rewards you but doesn’t get in the way. Then let the system do what it was built to do.

Create your next market, seed it deliberately, and let conviction compound.

Ready to create your next market? 

Join the Mainnet Beta and begin trading your convictions today.

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Prediction markets have a timing problem.

It shows up near the end of almost every market. The event is close. Most of the uncertainty is gone. Anyone paying attention can see where things are headed. And at that point, trades start to cluster on one side, pushing prices in a predictable direction.

The people placing those trades are rarely the ones who took the earliest risk. They’re usually the ones arriving last, acting on information that only became obvious near the finish line. And they’re often trading against liquidity that earlier participants helped put there.

This isn’t about frontrunning or transaction ordering. It’s value extracted through timing; a form of MEV driven by when information arrives, not how transactions are sequenced.

XO Market was designed with this problem in mind.

How End-Stage MEV Appears

You can see this dynamic clearly in large, well-known markets.

Take major election markets. During the 2024 US election cycle, platforms like Polymarket processed billions in volume, with a disproportionate share arriving in the final days and hours before resolution. By that point, polling averages, betting lines, and media consensus had already narrowed the outcome and allowing later traders to profit off of their informational asymmetry.

The same thing happens in sports, macro events, and regulatory decisions:

• Early markets trade on uncertainty and interpretation

• Mid-market activity shapes the narrative

• Late-stage volume clusters around the “obvious” outcome

• Prices drift steadily in one direction right up to settlement

Early traders do the hard work: taking positions when information is messy and anchoring the market so others can trade at all. Late traders benefit from that structure with far less risk.

And this isn’t a corner case, it’s the default behavior for most markets out there today.

Why Waiting Is Usually Rational

Most prediction markets quietly encourage this behavior.

They treat early and late participants the same, even though they’re taking very different kinds of risk. Early traders provide liquidity and price discovery when uncertainty is highest. Late traders step in when the remaining uncertainty is small.

If both are rewarded the same way, the rational strategy is to wait.

That’s why so many markets feel inactive until the final stretch. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that participating early usually means worse prices, higher slippage, longer capital lockups, and trading against people with better information later.

Markets that punish early participation train users to sit on their hands. When everyone waits, price discovery happens late, or not at all.

Changing the Mechanics: Adaptive Liquidity and Rebalancing

XO Market’s first intervention is mechanical.

Instead of static liquidity, XO Market uses a unified, adaptive market maker (LS-LMSR). Liquidity starts light and deepens automatically as volume grows.

What this changes in practice:

• Early trades move prices meaningfully when information is scarce

• Later trades face deeper pools, making prices harder to push around mechanically

• Liquidity scales with attention instead of being fixed at launch

This doesn’t remove information advantage, nor should it. But it prevents that advantage from being amplified by fragile market structure.

On the creator side, there’s a parallel issue. Markets need to launch with neutral liquidity so every outcome is tradable. That neutrality makes sense on day one. It makes less sense once odds skew heavily.

Liquidity rebalancing fixes this.

Creators can now adjust their exposure as the market evolves, rather than being stuck with day-one assumptions while information changes. They can reduce positions they no longer want and realign liquidity with the current shape of the market.

Early creation no longer means being locked into stale exposure.

Shortening the Window for Extraction

Timing-based extraction works best when markets linger after the answer is effectively known.

If an outcome is clear but resolution drags on, late traders have time to position with minimal uncertainty. Early traders wait, capital locked, while prices grind toward resolution.

XO Market’s hybrid resolution model is designed to reduce that window:

• Clear outcomes resolve quickly

• Ambiguous cases escalate when necessary

• Most markets settle without prolonged delays

This matters because early conviction shouldn’t come with the longest lockups. Faster settlement reduces the period where information advantage is highest and unpriced.

Who Gets Paid for Liquidity

There’s still one asymmetry that mechanics alone don’t solve.

Early traders don’t just take risk — they fund the market. Their liquidity tightens spreads, supports later volume, and enables efficient pricing. In most systems, that contribution isn’t explicitly rewarded.

Late traders benefit from both better information and better liquidity. Only one of those inputs is priced.

XO Market is moving toward fee-sharing mechanisms that return a portion of market fees to early buyers and long-term holders. The goal is straightforward: if your liquidity helped keep the market viable, you should share in the value it generates.

This doesn’t eliminate late-stage trading. It simply ensures that providing liquidity over time isn’t invisible.

What Changes

When early participation stops being structurally disadvantaged, market behavior shifts in predictable ways.

Creators are more willing to make markets early and let the crowd do the work. Traders are more willing to take early positions instead of sitting on the sidelines. Prices begin moving closer to when ideas emerge, not just when events are about to resolve. Markets stop behaving like countdown timers and start being more lively.

Price discovery happens earlier.

Liquidity arrives sooner.

It’s better for everyone.

Early conviction still carries risk, that’s inevitable. But the aim isn’t to eliminate timing advantages. It’s to make sure markets don’t depend on waiting to function. Because if no one wants to go first, there’s no market at all.

Want to see our system in action?

Join the Mainnet Beta and begin earning your achievements today.

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Aura II represents a new phase. Rankings are earned through live participation during this campaign.

It runs quietly in the background via the Airaa protocol. You don’t need to be an influencer or a power trader. If you contribute in ways that actually matter, you’ll appear on the leaderboard. If you don’t, you won’t.

That’s the whole idea.

Important: This is a Bonus Layer

Before diving into the mechanics, it is critical to understand where Aura II fits.

This is a supplementary campaign.

Aura II runs alongside the core Conviction Points program, not against it. You are still earning your primary TGE allocation simply by using XO Market and accumulating standard Conviction Points.

Think of Aura II as an "Elite Side Quest." It is a dedicated, additional prize pool (0.2% of supply) for those who want to compete for a bonus on top of their standard rewards. Participating in Aura II does not negatively impact your existing Conviction Points.

How to Win: Two Paths to Victory

Conviction Aura II allocates a portion of the XO Market token supply ahead of TGE to contributors who rank highest on the leaderboard.

Rewards are no longer just one big list. To ensure we reward both active users and vocal advocates, Aura II is split into two distinct leaderboards.

1. The Global Airaa Contributors Leaderboard

This tracks your social signal and reach.

The Formula: Airaa’s Base Points × XO Market multiplier. (social + onchain contributions)

Put it simply, the more talk more about XO Market on socials and the more you use XO Market, the higher you’ll climb.

*Note: While the UI may display the Top 200 participants for visibility, only the Top 100 on this leaderboard will be rewarded.

2. The XO Market Users Leaderboard

This tracks on-chain usage and how extensively you use XO Market.

The Formula: Airaa’s Base Points × XO Market Multiplier (social + onchain contributions) 

You might have noticed that the formula is the same as the The Global Airaa Contributors Leaderboard, the only difference is this leaderboard is for genuine power users, you must have an on-chain multiplier greater than 5 to qualify for this list. Think of it as a way for you to still be in a leaderboard even though your social account might not have the biggest reach yet.

Rankings are determined purely by these scores. There’s no manual selection, no subjective judging, and no hidden categories. Higher rank earns a larger allocation. Lower rank earns less.

Rewards are subject to a lock and vest schedule to keep incentives long-term, but the signal is immediate: meaningful participation today translates into ownership tomorrow.

FAQ: What if I rank on both? If you are skilled enough to rank in the Top 100 on both leaderboards, you will remain visible on both lists, but you will be awarded based on your single highest rank. You cannot claim double rewards for the same campaign period.

The Multiplier Engine

Aura II doesn’t reward raw activity. It rewards weighted participation.

Your social activity earns you an Aura Score. This score is then multiplied based on how deeply you’re using XO Market itself. In practice, this works as a single composite multiplier. Here are some on-chain actions that the algo looks at:

1. Trading Volume

2. Market Creation

3. Referrals

4. Social Actions

While the main leaderboards refresh every 24 hours, your personal multiplier updates every 1 hour, giving you near real-time feedback.

How to Participate

Getting involved in Aura II is intentionally simple.

You must connect your X account on Airaa.

On-chain tracking and campaign participation only start after connecting your X account to Airaa. If you are a top trader generating volume but haven't linked your account, you are effectively not in the campaign.

Once linked, just participate the way you normally would:

• Post insights or takes on X (mentioning Airaa).

• Trade on XO Market.

• Create markets.

All of this earns Aura Score automatically. From there, your activity on XO Market - trading volume, referrals, engagement actions, and performance - boosts your multipliers and pushes you up the leaderboard.

There are no forms to fill out, no submissions to manage, and no special hoops to jump through. Airaa tracks everything in the background and updates the leaderboard daily.

What Actually Counts

It’s important to remember that Aura II rewards signal, not spam. Things that consistently score well:

• Timely takes

• Useful memes

• Original insights

• Clear explanations

• Market breakdowns

• Smart engagement in general

• Actual trading and market creation

• Helping others understand the platform

Things that don’t:

• Repetition

• Bot farming

• X communities

• AI generated slop

• Low-effort posting

• Engagement farming

• Volume without substance

You don’t need to post constantly. You need to contribute meaningfully and stay involved. You can find out more at the Airaa learning hub.

Aura II FAQ

What happens if I rank on both leaderboards? You will remain visible on both lists, but you will be awarded based on your single highest rank. You cannot claim double rewards from this specific bonus pool.

I’m a top trader, but I haven't linked my X account. What happens? Linking is essential. On-chain tracking for the Aura multiplier only begins after you connect your X account to Airaa. While you might appear on a global leaderboard based on raw stats, you are not officially part of the Airaa campaign—and cannot earn these specific rewards—without an X connection.

Does the campaign count my lifetime actions or just activity from today? Aura II recognizes your legacy. It counts your lifetime actions on the platform, including the 1x multiplier for any markets you have created in the past.

How often does the data refresh?

• Leaderboard: Updates every 24 hours.

• Your Multiplier: Reflects your latest activity once every hour.

Get Started

Connect your accounts to Airaa, start contributing, and let the system do the rest.

Ready to start?

Join the Mainnet Beta and begin trading your convictions today.

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Truth is, prediction markets have always had problems with liquidity. Or more accurately - fragmented liquidity. Most platforms split their liquidity across dozens of binary pools, forcing traders to navigate shallow books, broken odds, and untradeable long-tail ideas.

Moreover, all of these prediction markets only had to focus on a small set of admin-created markets. They can afford to concentrate their liquidity. We have to handle a cascade of user-generated markets, which is much more difficult at scale.

In the end, fixing liquidity at scale required us to rethink the AMM itself. That’s why XO Market runs on a unified, adaptive liquidity engine: LS-LMSR. It keeps every market tradeable from the moment it launches, handles any number of outcomes from a single pool, and gets deeper as the crowd shows up.

This system is pretty unique compared to other AMMs, it has a bunch of idiosyncrasies which we will explore now, in addition to some new feature releases for our market creators. Let’s dive in…

Why Unified Liquidity Matters

Traditional prediction markets don’t really have multi-outcome markets - they have a bundle of Yes/No markets pretending to be one. Each outcome gets its own shallow pool, odds drift independently, and liquidity gets chopped into inefficient fragments. Our earlier writeups cover this in detail, but the takeaway is simple: fragmentation kills the long tail.

Our platform is all about the long tail, so we couldn’t use traditional infrastructure. Instead, XO Market takes the opposite approach. Every market, whether two outcomes or twenty, uses one shared collateral pool.

When someone buys Outcome A, A goes up and every other outcome adjusts downward in one coherent motion. Traders don’t need five trades to express one view; creators only seed a single pool; and the entire distribution stays mathematically consistent at all times.

Under the hood, LS-LMSR behaves like a softmax over all outcomes. It guarantees continuous prices, ensures every outcome stays tradable, and prevents the “dead branches” problem that plagues binary-bundle platforms. In practice, it’s the reason even small, weird, niche markets work on XO Market.

Adaptive Depth: How LS-LMSR Scales Liquidity Automatically

Classic LMSR uses a fixed b-parameter (which determines liquidity sensitivity, AKA how much prices move in response to trades). If b is too small, markets feel twitchy; if it’s too big, they feel stuck in wet concrete. LS-LMSR solves that by making liquidity scale with activity:

b = α × Q (Q = total liquidity / trading depth in the market)

Early on, Q is small and b is small - the pool is light and sensitive. Small trades move prices noticeably, which is good because it rewards early conviction and reveals signal. As more people trade, Q grows, b grows with it, and the pool deepens automatically. Prices become smoother, slippage tightens, and even big trades glide through without blowing up the curve.

This self-adjusting liquidity is why a market can start life with a modest seed and still scale into thousands of trades without needing manual intervention. It’s also why XO Market can support rapid-fire, user-generated markets at internet speed.

The liquidity curve grows as the feed grows.

Pricing and Odds Impact

XO Market does not match buyers and sellers. There is no order book. Instead, the AMM uses LS-LMSR’s cost function to determine marginal prices in real time.

This leads to three predictable - but often misunderstood - behaviors:

Your trade moves the price

The price you see is the marginal price - the cost of buying the next infinitesimal share. If you submit a meaningful size (say $200 into a thin pool), your trade moves the curve as it executes. This produces an average execution higher than the displayed price.

This is not a spread or fee; it’s pure price impact. Your conviction literally shifts the odds.

Outcome totals can exceed 1

LS-LMSR prices are not strict probabilities - they are marginal prices from a convex cost curve. In small or skewed markets you will see totals like:

• YES + NO = 1.03

• A/B/C = 1.12

• Or sometimes < 1

This is intentional. The slight “overhang” is how LMSR manages liquidity in thin markets. It keeps both sides tradable, prevents the pool from breaking, and holds collateral inside the AMM for settlement.

Payouts are sometimes above (or below) $1

Because all slippage and spread effects stay inside the pool:

• Deep, balanced markets often resolve above $1 per winning share

• Thin or extremely lopsided markets may resolve slightly below $1

• Middle-of-the-road markets usually land near $1

None of this goes to XO Market. LS-LMSR redistributes 100% of the collateral to winning shares at resolution.

In short: Price impact stays in the pool → winners receive it later.

Why All of This Matters

XO Market is built for scale: thousands of markets, launched by thousands of people, moving at the speed of the internet. You cannot support that with orderbooks, manual market makers, or fragmented liquidity. You need unified pools, adaptive depth, and mechanics that make markets viable long before they’re big.

LS-LMSR gives us that base layer. It’s what lets conviction trade cleanly, whether the market is tiny, exploding, or anywhere in between.

Ready to check it out for yourself?

Join the Mainnet Beta and begin trading your convictions today.

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That changes now.

Liquidity rebalancing lets creators realign their liquidity with their conviction, reduce unwanted exposure, and keep their position coherent with how the market actually looks, not how it looked on day one.

Let’s dive in!

The Problem

Until now, creators had one invisible disadvantage: their seed liquidity always entered at a fixed, neutral distribution (typically 50/50 or evenly across outcomes). Here’s what that meant in practice:

1. Creator seeds $500 at launch.

2. Early traders pump a side to 80%.

3. Creator’s initial liquidity remains stuck around the midpoint.

4. The AMM's curve shape means the creator’s liquidity takes mild losses as the curve stretches toward the new skew.

5. Low-volume markets exaggerate this effect - creators earn fees but if the volume isn’t high enough then they might lose small amounts because they’re “anchored” to stale odds.

This is the problem rebalancing solves.

Quick Guide: How to Rebalance Your Liquidity

Step 1: Open Your Market and Set Your New Distribution

Open your profile by clicking the icon in the upper right corner of your screen. Then navigate to the “My Markets” section of your profile. Locate the market you want to rebalance then open the “Actions” drop down and click the “Rebalance” option.

Step 2: Set Your New Distribution

On the rebalance screen, first select which of the outcomes you hold you wish to sell. Then choose how much of your existing position you want to sell and how you want to redistribute it across outcomes.

Step 3: Review the Ratio and Confirm

The right-hand panel shows your current exposure and a live preview of what your new outcome balances will look like after rebalancing. Check the Rebalance Ratio at the bottom, this tells you how many new shares you’ll receive for each share sold, based on current market odds.

Think of this as a swap rate based on current market prices:

• If you’re swapping a cheap outcome (e.g., 0.10) into an expensive one (e.g., 0.90), you should expect to get fewer shares because you’re buying into the favorite.

• If you’re swapping an expensive outcome into a cheap one, you’ll receive more shares because you’re selling high and buying low.
  

To make this easier to understand, the ratio is color-coded:

• 0.5 - 1.0 (Green): More efficient as prices are relatively aligned.

• 0.2 - 0.5 (Yellow): Moderately inefficient due to the price mismatch.

• 0.0 - 0.2 (Red): Very inefficient as you’re selling from a cheaper outcome into a much more expensive one.

Once the distribution and ratio look right, click Confirm Rebalance

And that’s it, now your market’s liquidity has been rebalanced to reflect your conviction.

Best Practices

Rebalancing works best when you treat your liquidity like an active position rather than something you set once and forget. A few simple habits make a big difference in how effectively you manage exposure and avoid curve-driven losses:

• Rebalance early: The earlier you realign your liquidity, the more exposure you can shift toward the side you actually believe in.

• Keep an eye on markets near resolution: Odds tighten quickly as resolution approaches. A smart late rebalance can reduce unwanted exposure or lock in a cleaner risk profile.

• Use rebalancing to adjust risk, not chase outcomes: Rebalancing lets you position yourself intelligently instead of being dragged into curve shapes you never intended to hold.

Overall, the best results come from treating rebalancing as a maintenance tool, adjusting your liquidity when the market moves so your exposure stays aligned with your conviction (or your risk tolerance).

Why This Matters

This wasn’t a bug - it was simply necessary to ensure both sides of a market started off liquid and tradable. But it didn’t give creators control once the market shifted.

Rebalancing solves this. Instead of being locked into the initial distribution, creators can now withdraw their position internally and redeploy it around the updated odds. This has three major effects:

• It aligns the creator’s exposure with present-day prices, not the prices on day one.

• It protects creators in low volume / highly skewed markets, where odds diverge sharply from the initial midpoint.

• It allows creators to express conviction with their liquidity, not just their fees or titles.

Rebalancing turns liquidity provision from a “set it and hope for the best” mechanic into an active, expressive part of market creation. Creators can adjust risk, tighten spreads at the real price, and avoid losing value simply because the early order flow skewed the market.

For traders, this means healthier books, tighter spreads, and depth that reflects the actual probability distribution - not the initial launch conditions. For the platform, it means creators feel safer seeding markets, which leads to more markets, more volume, and better signals for everyone.

Try It Now

XO Market is built for scale: thousands of markets, launched by thousands of people, moving at the speed of the internet. You cannot support that with fragmented liquidity. You need adaptive depth and mechanics that make markets viable long before they’re big. 

Liquidity rebalancing is live now on the Mainnet Beta, enabling creators to adjust their positions dynamically and let conviction trade cleanly, whether the market is big, small, or anywhere in between.

Ready to check it out for yourself?

Join the Mainnet Beta and begin trading your convictions today.

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Check out r/XOmarket

Deposits flowed through the bridge, markets launched with live liquidity, and the leaderboard began airdropping rewards. We had already seen success in the Alpha Testnet but would that scale to the Mainnet Beta?

A week later, the answer is clear: conviction scales!

The community showed up, volume poured in, and markets held their ground.

Let’s run the tape.

The Numbers

Seven days on mainnet delivered:

• Total Volume: $3.8M

• Total Users: 21k

• Markets Created: 150

• Avg Market Volume: $25k

The early figures tell the same story that Alpha hinted at - conviction works when it’s given real stakes. The community showed up, trading across categories and forming deeper pools around the strongest markets.

For a first week on mainnet, the results speak for themselves.

The Shift to USDC

The move from test tokens to USDC changed everything. In Alpha, conviction was free; in Beta, it actually costs something.

We wondered how the community would react - Alpha users were incredibly active, but would that carry over once real money was involved? Turns out: absolutely. From day one, traders bridged straight onto XO Network with near-instant confirmations. The flow was steady and organic, as shown by the numbers.

Every trade now carried weight. Positions felt a lot more intentional. And with protocol fees removed during Beta, volume kept moving.

We also hit a couple of small launch snags - some minor visual glitches, a UI bug that briefly blocked market submissions, and one market that needed a quick pause to fix a rounding issue. All were patched quickly, and none affected funds or momentum.

Real stakes brought real conviction, and the community responded exactly how we hoped.

The Leaderboard

The leaderboard heated up from the first window, and this time, it wasn’t just about bragging rights. Rewards were live.

The airdrop program rolled out exactly as expected: 20,000 USDC, streamed over 10 days to the top 50 Alpha traders. Staying active and maintaining volume became the name of the game.

By the end of week one, volume was both high and consistent. The top spots changed hands constantly as traders fought to keep their drip alive.

Shoutout to the current top performers:

1. @chonkyy69

2. @LexDman

3. @LisaWil72157416

4. @Poly_maker

5. @ALzaD00

Each leaderboard cycle resets with a fresh opportunity to climb, so keep an eye out.

The Markets

Markets improved fast in week one. The 500 USDC minimum seed (scaling to 1,000 USDC for the 1% creator fee) meant less quantity, but more quality markets than Alpha right out of the gate.

Creators took more care framing their questions, tightening rules, and attaching real sources. On our end, far more markets were approved on the first pass. Having said all that, the cascade of markets was still much more than we expected; 150 in week 1, when we expected just 50.

We did run into a couple of early-week quirks: some AI-generated rule sets were too ambiguous and had to be rejected, one market hit a rounding bug that required a short pause, and another briefly displayed the wrong result on the frontend. All cosmetic issues, all fixed quickly.

The overall trend was unmistakable: cleaner markets, smoother liquidity, faster trades - and a feed that feels more alive because conviction is now backed by real capital.

The Takeaway

Week one of Mainnet Beta proved the system holds under pressure. Liquidity stayed healthy, traders kept showing up, and the transition to USDC worked exactly as intended.

Now the focus shifts to building on that foundation. The next focus is on expanding creator tools, rolling out fee-sharing for traders and holders, and introducing liquidity automation to make seeding effortless.

Mainnet is live.

USDC is flowing.

Conviction is only getting stronger.

Ready to start?

Join the Mainnet Beta and begin trading your convictions today.

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Check out r/XOmarket

1. USDC Going Live

Deposits, trades, and settlement runs on-chain in USDC (other tokens coming soon). Depositing is supported by a variety of EVM chains like Base, BNB,Ethereum and many others making it simple to move funds in and out.

2. Market Creation Changes

During the first phase of Beta, creating a new market will require a minimum seed of 500 USDC. This threshold ensures high-quality, meaningful markets early on. As the ecosystem matures, this requirement will be systematically reduced, making market creation more accessible over time.

Your Catalyst Badge will carry over from Alpha if you already have one - if you don’t, you’ll need to earn a Catalyst Badge.To mint the Catalyst Badge during Beta, you’ll need to earn at least 500 Conviction Points (CP).

Conviction Points are earned through active participation, mainly by trading in markets, but also through other forms of contribution and engagement across the platform.

This ensures early badge holders are true catalysts of the ecosystem, the people who showed conviction early and helped kickstart the markets.

3. Invite-Gated Access

The app is open for everyone to explore, but trading requires a referral code.

Each verified user receives 1 referral code that can be used 5 times to invite others. When your referrals trade, you earn Conviction Points (CP), rewarding the builders of early network effects.

Everything else got an upgrade As a part of this change we have included a number of tweaks and improvements. The resolver is faster, the UI tighter, sharing easier, and in-app notifications now keep you informed.

What to Expect

When Beta opens, you’ll deposit USDC straight into XO Market via our in app deposit flow. Markets will move cleaner, reviews and resolutions will take place faster, and conviction will finally live where it belongs - onchain, priced, and ranked.

You’ll see the first live volume curves, the leaderboard tick in real time, and the crowd testing conviction with actual stakes.

From there, we roll out new features like Referral and CP boosts for early Beta traders

For now, this is your signal.

Get your wallet ready.

XO Market Mainnet Beta is coming soon.

Get Ready…

Alpha showed us what conviction looks like.

Beta will show us what it’s worth.

The Alpha leaderboard snapshot will take place today, November 3rd at 18:00 CET.

After that snapshot, trading on Alpha will no longer generate CP, and once Beta goes live, all Alpha markets will close at their current price.

Alpha will officially stop once Mainnet Beta is live.

Stay tuned for the full official announcement and launch day guide - with everything you’ll need to bridge, trade, and climb the leaderboard.

The countdown has started.

See you on the feed.

While you’re waiting, join the Alpha and stay tuned. Or be the first to know by joining our community.

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

Check out r/XOmarket

1. USDC Going Live

Deposits, trades, and settlement runs on-chain in USDC (other tokens coming soon). Depositing is supported by a variety of EVM chains like Base, BNB,Ethereum and many others making it simple to move funds in and out.

2. Market Creation Changes

During the first phase of Beta, creating a new market will require a minimum seed of 500 USDC. This threshold ensures high-quality, meaningful markets early on. As the ecosystem matures, this requirement will be systematically reduced, making market creation more accessible over time.

Your Catalyst Badge will carry over from Alpha if you already have one - if you don’t, you’ll need to earn a Catalyst Badge.To mint the Catalyst Badge during Beta, you’ll need to earn at least 500 Conviction Points (CP).

Conviction Points are earned through active participation, mainly by trading in markets, but also through other forms of contribution and engagement across the platform.

This ensures early badge holders are true catalysts of the ecosystem, the people who showed conviction early and helped kickstart the markets.

3. Invite-Gated Access

The app is open for everyone to explore, but trading requires a referral code.

Each verified user receives 1 referral code that can be used 5 times to invite others. When your referrals trade, you earn Conviction Points (CP), rewarding the builders of early network effects.

Everything else got an upgrade As a part of this change we have included a number of tweaks and improvements. The resolver is faster, the UI tighter, sharing easier, and in-app notifications now keep you informed.

What to Expect

When Beta opens, you’ll deposit USDC straight into XO Market via our in app deposit flow. Markets will move cleaner, reviews and resolutions will take place faster, and conviction will finally live where it belongs - onchain, priced, and ranked.

You’ll see the first live volume curves, the leaderboard tick in real time, and the crowd testing conviction with actual stakes.

From there, we roll out new features like Referral and CP boosts for early Beta traders

For now, this is your signal.

Get your wallet ready.

XO Market Mainnet Beta is coming soon.

Get Ready…

Alpha showed us what conviction looks like.

Beta will show us what it’s worth.

The Alpha leaderboard snapshot will take place today, November 3rd at 18:00 CET.

After that snapshot, trading on Alpha will no longer generate CP, and once Beta goes live, all Alpha markets will close at their current price.

Alpha will officially stop once Mainnet Beta is live.

Stay tuned for the full official announcement and launch day guide - with everything you’ll need to bridge, trade, and climb the leaderboard.

The countdown has started.

See you on the feed.

While you’re waiting, join the Alpha and stay tuned. Or be the first to know by joining our community.

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

Check out r/XOmarket

Prediction markets showed the world that prices can capture information faster than pundits. But scaling them into a daily habit hit four recurring walls: gatekept creation, fragile resolution, liquidity fragmentation, and UX made for insiders.

It appears prediction markets are going through another one of these moments right now; volumes are up, attention is back, and new entrants are pushing into the space. Meanwhile, prediction markets have trended on X, with the platform recently naming Polymarket its official prediction-market partner. The penultimate moment was the recent South Park episode “Conflict of Interest” centering the plot on prediction-market apps, driving spikes in searches.

But the same structural issues remain, and without solving them, history risks repeating. That’s the gap conviction markets were designed to close.

The Road to the Mainstream

Prediction markets first proved their edge long before crypto. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Iowa Electronic Markets and InTrade showed how prices could consistently beat punditry. Contract prices mapped directly to probabilities, often outperforming polls. But legal risk, thin liquidity, and clunky settlement capped their growth.

The idea was right, but the infrastructure wasn’t there yet.

The first on-chain wave came with Augur and Gnosis. They brought markets to Ethereum but ran into high fees, brittle UX, and slow transactions. Every interaction was slow and grinding. The result was proof of concept without product-market fit.

Momentum returned in 2020. Two different bets defined the period:

• Polymarket simplified UX, launched on Polygon, and moved toward a peer-to-peer order book to attract real liquidity providers.

• Kalshi went the opposite route, taking the regulated path as a CFTC-designated exchange with strict KYC/AML.

Adoption broke out during the 2024 U.S. election, when Polymarket alone processed billions. Traders stuck around after the headlines faded, moving into macro, sports, and crypto. Polymarket later secured CFTC licensing too, a sign that event trading was becoming a major category.

By late 2024, the framing had widened beyond “prediction” into information finance (InfoFi): three-sided markets with bettors on one side and readers, humans or machines, on the other. Bettors express their conviction; readers consume the outputs as real-time probabilities.

Roadblocks Along the Way

Even as prediction markets started to prove their edge, a few deep structural problems kept them from scaling. The ideas were right — the infrastructure wasn’t.

1. Gatekeepers: Most platforms relied on centralized admins to decide which markets were allowed. That meant the content always lagged behind culture. Early projects like Augur only listed a few “serious” questions, while Polymarket’s feed in 2021–22 stayed limited to U.S. politics and COVID headlines. The result: by the time a market went live, the conversation had already moved on.

2. Resolvers: Outcomes were decided by token votes or governance processes that left room for capture. One infamous example was the Polymarket “Zelensky suit” market, where ambiguous rules and a token-vote dispute turned a trivial yes/no question into a costly mess. Similar governance failures, like UMA’s bridge dispute in 2023 that froze $120M, showed how fragile “trustless” resolution could be when incentives misaligned.

3. Liquidity: Most prediction markets treated every outcome as its own pool — Biden: Yes/No, Trump: Yes/No, Sanders: Yes/No — instead of one shared structure. Liquidity splintered across these silos, leaving smaller outcomes untradable. Traders flocked to the big names, and the long tail dried up.

4. User Experience: Crypto UX turned even the most curious users away. Setting up wallets, bridging tokens, paying gas — all before placing a single trade — was too much friction. Platforms like Augur and early Polymarket worked for insiders, but not for everyday users. Meanwhile, betting apps like DraftKings and FanDuel removed all that friction, delivering one-click deposits, instant resolution, and clean interfaces.

Prediction markets never overcame these hurdles at scale. The structure just wasn’t built for real-time culture or mass participation.

From Prediction to Conviction

Most prediction markets were stuck in narrow structures: admin-approved questions, binary pools, slow oracles. Liquidity scattered, and the excitement faded as soon as the big events passed.

Conviction markets take the same idea and rebuild it from the ground up for real-time internet behavior. On XO Market, outcomes share one liquidity pool through the LS-LMSR model. Every trade updates the full distribution, so odds always add up, and depth scales automatically as attention grows. It’s a model built to keep even small, niche markets liquid and alive.

Resolution follows the same rule: fast when it can be, fair when it needs to be. MODRA, XO Market’s hybrid resolver, uses AI to close clear outcomes instantly and human juries for the edge cases. Together, they keep resolution reliable without slowing things down.

And now, creation is open. Anyone can launch a market, seed it, and earn from the activity it attracts. Every market carries a name and a reputation, making authorship visible and accountability real. Instead of a handful of gatekeepers deciding what’s worth trading, the crowd decides in real time.

Proving Conviction IRL

Alpha wasn’t built to prove that people like to bet — it was built to test whether conviction itself can behave like an economy.

And it did.

Since launch, XO Market Alpha has grown into a full-scale feedback loop: >18,000 users, >$1.1B in test-token volume, and >750 live markets. The reason it stuck is simple — it feels alive. CrowdFeed replaced dashboards with a scrolling feed where discovery happens instantly. Markets reprice in public, find their audience, and stay active as long as attention does.

Then came open market creation. In just weeks, hundreds of new markets went live — some serious, some playful, all fueled by curiosity. Traders joined to argue, creators refined their rules, and outcomes got sharper as the crowd weighed in. The platform didn’t need curation anymore; it evolved on its own.

That’s the real proof of conviction markets: when belief, attention, and liquidity start reinforcing each other. Alpha showed that loop can sustain itself.

Now the next step is simple — take it public.

What’s Next…

The Alpha proved conviction markets work. The next step is taking them public.

Beta will open the gates: real money trading and fiat on-ramps, and fully open creation. From there the sky is the limit. Our team has been cooking up some ideas, from continuous markets to conviction indexes. The next step (here’s some Alpha for you); multi-outcome markets, read more here.

That’s why we built XO Market: unified liquidity, fast and fair resolution, open creation with reputational weight, and a feed people actually use. The Alpha showed the loop works. Beta will take it mainstream.

Ready to start?

Join the Alpha, claim your Catalyst, keep your Peck-in streak alive, and create the market you want to see.

Grab an invite code join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

For the first time, anyone on XO Market could create a conviction, seed it with liquidity, and let the crowd decide. The response was immediate.

Within hours, the feed exploded. Markets appeared faster than we could scroll them: crypto narratives, meme culture moments, political micro-events, on-chain gossip, sports finals, etc.

One week later, the results are in.

The shift from admin-curated to community-led creation has transformed the feed. More markets, more variation, more choice. In just seven days, it shifted from a curated list of markets to something that looks and behaves more like the internet itself

Let’s recap the first week of open market creation.

The Numbers

The response was instant. In the first week of open creation, XO Market crossed every previous Alpha milestone.

• >650 markets created

• >18,000 users active

• >500,000 trades executed

• > $1B total volume (test tokens)

• > $1.2M average market volume

Volume wasn’t concentrated, it was distributed across the spectrum. Big topics and niche curiosities alike found liquidity. Participation grew across every category. Crypto still leads, but culture, sports, politics, and memes quickly followed. The long tail is now liquid.

The Markets

The first week of open creation showed exactly how fast conviction moves when it isn’t curated.

Crypto dominated early.

Markets like “MONAD Token Launches Above $1” and “Celestia Crosses $10 Before Year-End” drew steady flow and sharp repricing as new information hit.

Finance followed with “US federal government shutdown ends on or before Nov” and “Apple to Announce Web3 Collaboration by 2025 End” in tech became some of the highest-traded markets within hours.

Others were smaller - sports picks, NFT prices, on-chain events - but together they filled out the feed. The result was a wider, more dynamic spread of conviction than any previous phase.

The Creators

Hundreds of Catalyst badge holders created markets this week. Most were new.

The pattern is clear.

Markets with clear titles, short expiry windows, and precise rules perform best. Early seeding helps, but distribution is what makes or breaks them.

Creator fees compounded quickly. The top markets earned thousands in test rewards, proving the feedback loop works: sharper framing attracts more trades, more trades deepen liquidity, and liquidity amplifies reach.

The first creator meta is already visible - timing and clarity win.

The Feed

CrowdFeed is now moving at internet speed.

Markets appear, trade, and resolve in a constant loop.

LS-LMSR keeps pricing coherent across the board, even for small pools.

Trending and category filters keep the feed usable.

Noise exists, but it’s manageable. Markets that don’t catch on fade quietly; the ones that hit, rise fast.

The rhythm feels new: part newsfeed, part orderbook, part scoreboard.

What’s Next

Open creation turned conviction into a living system. The structure held. Liquidity stayed stable. Traders adapted quickly. Next up we have some improvements and features cooking.

Alpha remains the sandbox. It’s where we keep testing, trading, and stacking points that carry forward. Behind the scenes, work is already underway on multi-outcome markets, on-ramps, payout-ready creator fees, and a seamless transition to live liquidity.

Open creation proved the core theory behind conviction markets.

Beta will show what it’s worth.

Ready to start?

Join the Alpha, claim your Catalyst, keep your Peck-in streak alive, and create the market you want to see.

Grab an invite code join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

Over 500 markets have gone live since the launch of open market creation! The number one issue we’ve seen creators run into so far?

Resolvability.

If a market can’t be resolved clearly, it can’t be trusted. And when traders don’t trust a market, they don’t trade it. It’s that simple. Markets like this can’t go live.

That’s why before every market is published, our MODRA reviews it to make sure it’s clear, verifiable, and distinct. The few times it’s not, we’ll request an update. You might’ve encountered this yourself: you frame a solid idea, submit it, and then get a note asking to clarify a rule, tighten the timeframe, or add a source.

Why does this happen?

Because the conviction is there, but the structure isn’t. Maybe the title is vague, the rules are missing a source, or two nearly identical versions of the same question are submitted. These flaws might sound small but they have the potential to tank your market.

The good news is it’s easy to fix. It just means thinking like a resolver: clear title, clear timeframe, clear source of truth.

Here’s what to do…

1. Start With a Clear Title

Every good market starts with a title that’s impossible to misinterpret. A title should read like a statement that can only be true or false, not like a question, opinion, or prediction.

Bad titles sound like conversation starters.

• “Will Bitcoin keep running?”

• “Is Solana the next Ethereum?”

Good titles read like convictions.

• “Bitcoin closes above $100,000 before December 31.”

• “Solana surpasses Ethereum in daily active addresses by June 1.”

See the difference? The first pair is opinion-driven. The second pair is verifiable. You can look it up, confirm it, and resolve it without guesswork. A clean title also defines its own boundaries: what, when, and how it resolves. If those are missing, the market isn’t ready.

2. Lock in an Expiry Date

Every market needs an expiry date. Without one, nobody knows when it ends, or when it’s supposed to resolve.

A good timeframe does two things:

• It makes the outcome measurable within a clear window.

• It gives traders confidence the result will be finalized promptly.

Too short, and the market resolves before it has time to build traction. Too long, and it disappears from memory before it matters. A tight, relevant window — days or weeks, not months or years — keeps attention and volume alive.

3. Anchor It to a Reliable Source

The source of truth decides everything. It’s how MODRA, jurors, and traders all verify the result. If your rules don’t name one, the market can’t go live.

Good sources are:

• Official (league websites, government reports, blockchain explorers).

• Stable (URLs or APIs unlikely to change).

• Independent (not personal posts, screenshots, or social speculation).

When in doubt, think like a resolver: could a neutral person, with no context, find and verify the outcome from your source in under a minute? If not, tighten it up.

4. Write Rules Like a Contract

Rules are where trust is won or lost. They don’t need to be long, but they need to be exact.

Your rules should clearly define three things:

1. What the event is, how it will be verified, and what happens in every edge case.

2. If something can plausibly happen that isn’t covered (like a delay, a technical glitch, or a change in reporting) you need to mention it.

3. The goal is to make resolution automatic, not interpretive.

Think of your rules as the resolver’s checklist. If the event happens, they should be able to read your rules and confirm the outcome without guessing what you meant. Include the timeframe, the criteria for “Yes” or “No,” and the specific data or source that determines it.

Avoid filler or fuzzy language. Words like “likely,” “major,” “official,” or “successful” sound clear in conversation but become unresolvable in practice. Replace them with objective conditions: a number, a date, or an explicit action that can be verified.

The best rules leave no room for debate, only verification.

5. Avoid Dupes and Overlaps

Duplicate markets fragment liquidity and confuse traders. Before submitting, search the feed to check if your idea already exists.

If there’s already a live or pending market with the same event or near-identical framing, hold off, or adjust your version to add something new. Different markets can cover similar events, but they should never resolve from the same source on the same condition at the same date. That’s just noise.

If you’re not sure whether your idea overlaps, reach out and ask us via Discord. Our community managers will be more than happy to help.

The Bottom Line

Markets that earn trust get traded. It’s that simple.

A good market doesn’t take sides — it just frames the question. The cleaner your language, the broader your audience. Remember: your job isn’t to convince, it’s to host a conviction.

Clarity beats cleverness.

Verifiability beats speculation.

Specific beats vague.

If you can read your market back and know exactly how and when it resolves, it’s probably ready to go. Write like a resolver. Think like a trader. And when you hit submit, make it a market that holds up.

Ready to start?

Join the Alpha, claim your Catalyst, keep your Peck-in streak alive, and create the market you want to see.

Grab an invite code join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

This new feature gives every user with a Catalyst badge the power to launch a market.

When you create, you’re not just writing a title and rules, you’re also seeding it with liquidity. That liquidity, the seed, does two things at once: it opens the door for others to trade, and it gives you skin in the game as the creator.

Seeding isn’t a donation. It’s a temporary stake.

If nobody trades in your market, you get your seed back in full (minus the standard 1% resolution fee). If people do trade, your seed circulates through the pool during the life of the market, and when it resolves, it comes back to you, alongside fee revenue that you made.

In short: your seed is the key that unlocks trading for your conviction markets.

How Seeding Works

Creating a market on our platform isn’t complicated. Here’s the flow:

1. Frame your conviction: Write a sharp, clear title and resolution rules.

2. Preview your market: See how it looks on CrowdFeed - title, rules, and expiry date.

3. Seed your liquidity: This is the crucial step. You choose a token (tUSDC, tSOL, or tTIA in Alpha), set the amount you want to seed, and pick a creator fee. That seed flows straight into XO’s LS-LMSR curve and gives your market its first live odds.

On XO Market, this seed flows into the LS-LMSR curve. The curve is what ensures there’s always a price for both sides. Your seed balances the pool and makes sure the first trader doesn’t face 100% slippage.

You also set a creator fee. That’s your upside: every trade that happens in your market pays you a slice, compounding as volume grows. Seeding is the cost of entry to earn fees.

Bounded Loss: The Worst-Case Scenario

But what if everyone piles onto one side? Say you seed a market, and then every trader buys “YES” while nobody touches “NO.” Are you wiped out?

No. This is where the LS-LMSR design matters.

Unlike an orderbook where a market maker can get drained completely, LMSR curves are built with bounded loss. That means there’s a maximum loss you can take, no matter how lopsided the trades become.

The math: your maximum loss is proportional to the liquidity you seeded, not to the total size of the market. You can’t lose more than the stake you put in.

For example:

• You seed with 100 tUSDC.

• Traders pile in heavy on one outcome.

• At resolution, you might lose part of that seed, but never more than the 100 you put down (but this is an unlikely scenario).

Your downside is capped, your upside scales with volume, and your reputation grows if your markets attract flow.

The Play for Market Creators

Seeding might sound like a risk, but it’s actually what makes the system run. Without it, markets wouldn’t open, and creators wouldn’t have upside. With it:

• Markets launch alive: Traders see a price and can act immediately.

• Creators get skin in the game: Your seed proves you believe in the market you framed.

• Fees compound: The more traders show up, the more your initial stake turns into ongoing earnings.

That’s the creator’s edge: your downside is capped, your upside compounds, and every market you seed builds both your reputation and your rewards.

Frame it clearly, seed it well, and let conviction do the rest.

The Bottom Line

Seeding isn’t a donation. It’s a temporary stake that unlocks liquidity, builds trust, and gives your market a shot at running. Bounded loss keeps your downside capped, while creator fees give your upside real potential.

👉 Next time you hit “Create,” remember: you’re not just stating a belief. You’re backing it with seed. And that’s what turns conviction into a liquid market.

Ready to start?

Join the Alpha, claim your Catalyst, keep your Peck-in streak alive, and begin creating markets today.

Grab an invite code join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

But that ends today. With our latest Alpha update, for the first time on XO Market, anyone can turn their strongly held belief into a live, tradable market. You now have the tools to capture attention and earn when the crowd shows up.

Now anyone can frame a conviction, seed it, and watch the community put conviction to the test. This means more markets, sharper signals, and a feed that reflects what our community really cares about.

Quick Guide: How to Create a Market

Prerequisites

Market creation is unlocked by the Catalyst Badge: a public, soulbound NFT attached to your account that unlocks conviction creation and adds a weekly allowance so the feed stays high-signal. To claim your Catalyst Badge, complete three milestones:

• Connect your X/Twitter — link your profile to a real identity

• Keep a 10 day Peck in streak — show up daily without missing

• Earn 500 Conviction Points (CP) — trade, comment, and contribute until you cross the line

📝 Note: CP rewards are now scaled down to encourage real trading over farming. Market creation now pays 20 CP, and test tokens now convert at $1,000 = 1 CP. Early Alpha users already locked in higher CP rewards; the closer we get to mainnet, the leaner CP incentives become.

Once you have the badge, your Create a conviction button lights up.

Your Catalyst Badge allows you to create 1 conviction per rolling 7-day window; the badge is permanent and soulbound unless removed for policy violations. Learn more about the Catalyst Badge and how to earn one here.

Once you’ve earned your Catalyst Badge, here’s how to create your market:

Step 1: Tell us your conviction

Start with a clear statement. You can let AI draft the full market instantly or build it manually with AI suggestions along the way.

Step 2: Define the details

Enter a clear title, short description, expiry date (in UTC), and additional context. Upload an image or cover media to make it pop in CrowdFeed.

Step 3: Set the rules

Resolution criteria are your trust layer. Define exactly how the outcome will be judged, list valid sources, and outline applies-to/excludes to avoid ambiguity.

Step 4: Preview your market

See a full preview card showing title, notes, rules, and resolver. Make edits if needed.

Step 5: Seed your conviction

Choose how much liquidity to provide, select your token (tUSDC, tSOL, tTIA during Alpha), and set a creator fee between 0%-1%. This fee becomes your revenue stream if your market attracts volume.

Step 6: Submit and Track

Confirm payment, submit for review, and track status in your “My Markets” dashboard. Once approved, your market goes live on CrowdFeed for the entire community.

Shifting to User Generated Markets

Up until now, Alpha markets were seeded by the XO Market team. That curation served its purpose, allowing us to stress-test LS-LMSR, market resolution, and the UX before opening the gates. But curated markets can only go so far. The internet moves faster than any team of curators ever could.

With open creation, the shape of the platform shifts entirely. Instead of a handful of flagship questions, the feed starts to look like the internet itself. A meme takes off? There’s a market. A scandal occurs? There’s a market. Breaking news? Someone spins it into a market within minutes.

This churn is a feature, not a bug. Most markets won’t go viral, and that’s fine. The long tail is where conviction markets shine. The feed becomes a living map of what people actually care about right now, priced in real time.

The trick is balance: noise versus signal. Catalyst, verified usernames, and weekly creation allowances give every market a visible author and built-in throttle. That means creators are forced to go for quality over quantity. Markets that are well-framed and timely get traction; low-effort markets fade without hurting the feed.

The result? A true shift from platform-led to user-led markets and a creator economy.

The Emergent Creator Economy

Open creation isn’t just about quantity, it’s about incentives. Every new market has an author, and authors now have upside. Seed liquidity anchors the price; creator fees capture a slice of every trade. If a market catches on, that flow compounds.

For creators, this flips the social script. Instead of chasing likes or reposts, you’re rewarded when your community shows up and trades. Distribution becomes your liquidity engine, timing becomes your fee machine. If you know how to move an audience, you know how to move a market.

For traders, the benefit is equally clear: more opportunities, more niches, and sharper signals. With every user able to create, you’re not stuck trading the same five big headlines, you can find an edge in thousands of small convictions priced at internet speed.

This dynamic is the core of the conviction economy: creators frame the questions, traders bring the conviction, and the platform turns it into liquid markets that update in real time.

What’s Next?

Alpha is the sandbox. Here you trade with test tokens, build a reputation, and prove you can create markets that matter. Every trade, referral, and market creation still stacks points toward Beta rewards.

Next up: public Beta with real-money trading, fiat on-ramps, and fully open creation. By then, Catalyst ensures the social layer is already in place: reputations established, trust legible, and markets sharp from day one.

Ready to start?

Join the Alpha, claim your Catalyst, keep your Peck-in streak alive, and create the market you want to see.

Grab an invite code join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

In the moment, thousands of people swear they saw it coming. Weeks later, the feeds are wiped clean and nobody can prove who was actually right.

That’s the internet’s memory problem: people’s calls get lost in the churn. Unless you already have a big following, nobody remembers your wins.

XO Market fixes that. Here, your calls don’t vanish into old threads or half-deleted tweets. Every trade, every market you create, every fee you earn — it’s logged, public, and tied to your name. Conviction doesn’t disappear; it compounds into a record that anyone can see.

Your Track Record

The moment you start trading or creating, you’re leaving a trail.

• A trade shows how strongly you believed, and when you acted.

• A market shows whether your framing was sharp enough to attract attention.

• A resolution shows if you were right or wrong.

Together, those moments add up to a track record.

Unlike on social media, you can’t rewrite history. You can’t delete a miss or quietly exaggerate a win. The results are on-chain, and the community can see it. Those results are what people use to decide which markets to trust and which traders to follow.

You can already see how this plays out elsewhere: on copy-trading platforms like eToro, top traders with visible two-year returns attract thousands of followers who literally mirror their trades. On these platforms reputation is distribution.

Trust and Liquidity

A good reputation garners attention. The stronger your record, the more weight your name carries.

When a creator with a good track record launches a market, traders are more likely to step in. When a trader with a history of reliable convictions takes a position, others notice. Liquidity follows trust, and trust follows reputation.

This creates a loop:

• Accurate convictions build reputation.

• Reputation attracts liquidity.

• Liquidity compounds into more influence.

Over time, the best traders rise to the top and pull communities with them. Just like crypto Twitter has its go-to voices, conviction markets will have their own. The difference is that here, the traders are putting real liquidity behind their convictions.

We saw this in Alpha’s first few weeks. Traders who nailed early Bitcoin and TIA markets became the ones others started watching. Creators whose markets framed timely questions consistently pulled in more volume.

Even though it was all test tokens, track records were already being built.

Why It Matters

What makes XO Market different is that every action is logged and linked to a Twitter/X account. That history gives people a reason to take you seriously, or not.

And history matters because consistency is rare. In traditional finance, over 80% of actively managed equity funds underperform the market over a 10-year period. Most people don’t beat the benchmark. That’s why the few who do consistently stand out.

Social media rewards noise. Predictions reward luck. Conviction markets reward accuracy. And because the record doesn’t vanish, the people who actually prove themselves will rise above the rest.

That reputational layer is how traders and creators separate themselves as the feed grows. And it’s how communities will form around the people who prove, over time, that they can be trusted.

What’s Next

Markets don’t forget. Every trade and every market adds to your record, and everyone can see it. Over time, the people who consistently put their convictions on the line — and get them right — will be the ones the rest follow.

The question isn’t whether you’re building a reputation. You already are. The question is what kind of reputation it will be.

Ready to start?

Join the Alpha, claim your Catalyst, keep your Peck-in streak alive, and create the market you want to see.

Grab an invite code join the Alpha

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Trends flare and vanish. Narratives flip overnight. What matters today might be forgotten tomorrow. Take GameStop in 2021. A subreddit turned into a trading floor and within days billions of dollars moved on nothing more than collective conviction.

Prediction markets tried to measure that pulse. But they moved too slowly, excluded too many voices, and failed to scale with culture itself. The feeds never looked like the internet’s feed.

XO Market was built to close that gap. A place where conviction becomes liquid, culture gets priced in real time, and the crowd itself decides what matters.

Origins: Where Prediction Markets Failed

We didn’t set out to build XO Market as founders. We started as frustrated users.

Like many in crypto, we were drawn to prediction markets because they promised something powerful: a new way to trade, and an engine for crowdsourcing truth. In theory, prediction markets should have been the future of forecasting. In practice, they repeatedly let us down.

We saw:

• Gatekeeping: Admins decided which questions were “allowed,” censoring entire ideas before they could exist.

• Liquidity traps: Most markets never had enough depth. Long-tail topics were effectively untradeable.

• Clunky UX: With crypto native mechanics everywhere, the barrier to entry was so high that normie users never stuck around.

• Resolution delays: When events ended, outcomes stalled in disputes or dragged on for weeks, eroding trust and leaving honest traders stranded.

The result was predictable: shallow liquidity, poor usability, and fading participation. The promise of prediction markets collapsed under the weight of their own design flaws.

That frustration sparked a question:

Why can’t anyone create their own market?

And from that question, XO Market was born.

Removing the Gatekeepers

If liquidity, UX, and resolution were the technical failures, gatekeeping was the cultural one.

Old platforms ran top-down. Only a small group of admins decided what counted as “worthy” of being a market. Whole ideas were censored before they could exist, and the result was a stale feed that rarely matched what people actually cared about.

We believed in the opposite. Markets on our platform are open for anyone to create. If it matters to you, you can frame it, seed it, and watch the crowd decide.

That shift is what makes conviction markets different: they don’t just capture mainstream headlines, they capture a much broader range of insights:

• Local events: Elections, rate decisions, policy shifts.

• Community debates: DAO votes, protocol milestones, collective goals.

• Cultural moments: Sports finals, meme battles, celebrity drama.

When markets are open, they become representative of real people’s beliefs — not just what a handful of admins approve.

And for creators, upside is built in. Every market carries a creator fee. If your framing is sharp, traders trust it, volume flows, and you earn. Your ability to surface timely, well-crafted questions becomes your distribution engine and your revenue stream.

Building for Conviction Over Prediction

Once we removed the gatekeepers, we realised it wasn’t just about who could create markets, it was about fixing the very foundations of how markets work.

Traditional prediction markets captured what people thought might happen, but they missed how strongly people believed it. That gap, “conviction”, is the difference between the signal and the noise.

To make that possible, we had to rebuild the stack from the ground up — solving the failures of liquidity, UX, and resolution along the way:

• LS-LMSR (Liquidity-Sensitive Market Maker): Conviction markets are unique, they need a unique liquidity algo. LS-LMSR deepens pools automatically as interest grows, keeping even long-tail markets viable as volume grows.

• CrowdFeed + accessible UX: We’re in the process of abstracting away all the complexities. Once we’re done, XO Market will feel more like scrolling a social feed than navigating a crypto app.

• XO Network: XO Market needs to scale without limits being placed on us. Celestia’s modular stack and Rollkit’s architecture gave us sovereign rails that can keep pace with what the devs are cooking.

• MODRA (AI + Jury Oracle): One of the biggest factors killing trust was resolvers. MODRA resolves in minutes when outcomes are clear, and escalates to a decentralized jury when they’re not. Fast when possible, fair when necessary.

Together, these choices turned conviction from a concept into something tangible. Every layer of the XO Market stack reinforced the same principle: belief should be measurable, transparent, and community-owned.

Hard Lessons and Changes

Of course, none of this was smooth. Like any startup, our journey was full of pivots, rewrites, and tough calls.

We shipped prototypes, only to throw parts of them away.We made creator flows too complex, then had to simplify them.We designed resolution rules that turned out to be ambiguous, forcing us to rethink how clarity was enforced.

Each of these moments was painful in the short term — but critical in the long run.

The lesson we kept coming back to: if a market isn’t clear, it fails everyone.

That’s why we created the Market Creator’s Checklist — six simple steps to keep every market fair and functional:

1. Start with a clear, measurable question.

2. Anchor to a strong, verifiable source of truth.

3. Set clear resolution rules and timeframes.

4. Keep wording neutral.

5. Test it before posting.

This checklist has helped us avoid convoluted markets. It’s how we protect trust, ensure fair outcomes, and help creators build markets that thrive.

Launching XO Market

In March 2025, we decided to test our vision at Celestia’s Mammothon hackathon.

Competing against more than 3,900 builders, we launched the world’s first live, user-created conviction market.

We finished as one of the Top 10 winning teams. More importantly, we left the hackathon with proof: user-generated conviction markets weren’t just possible, they were in demand. People didn’t just trade; they engaged. They debated. They created.

Then came Alpha:

• Week 1: 1,500 users, 4,243 transactions, $2.5M+ in test volume.

• Month 2: ~5,000 users, 43,000 transactions, $24.1M in test volume.

• Today: >15,000 users, >195,000 transactions, >$580M in test volume.

Alpha turned XO Market from an idea into a real product, and now conviction markets are live and scaling.

And yet, we’re only just beginning.

Open market creation is launching very soon. The open beta is on the horizon. CrowdFeed, our social UX layer, is making markets “grandma-friendly.” And every week, we’re reaching new heights.

The Next Chapter

Alpha proved conviction markets have demand. Thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of trades, and hundreds of millions in volume.

Now the gates are opening wider. Open market creation is next. Then public Beta, where anyone can jump in without barriers. After that, Mainnet — conviction markets, live and scaling without limits.

And beyond? A full oracle platform, deeper creator economies, and conviction feeds embedded everywhere from DAOs to media. What began as a fix for broken prediction markets is fast becoming something bigger: a real-time pricing layer for everyone’s strongly held beliefs.

We’ve only just started. The next chapter will be written by everyone who creates, trades, and turns conviction into culture.

Ready to start?

Join the Alpha, claim your Catalyst, keep your Peck-in streak alive, and create the market you want to see.

Grab an invite code join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

Conviction markets work best when their authors have reputation and consistency behind them.

That’s why we’re launching Catalyst: a permanent, earned badge that marks you as a market author on XO Market Alpha. Catalyst is soulbound to your profile, raising the trust floor from the moment you begin creating conviction markets.

Catalyst builds on the verified username feature we shipped recently. When your XO Market activity maps to your X/Twitter action has a clear source, making discovery faster and reputation provable.

That’s exactly what we want as we introduce open conviction market creation; markets with names behind them.

What Is Catalyst?

Catalyst is a creator-status badge you earn once and keep.

It is non-transferable, displayed on your profile, and unlocks a weekly allowance to create conviction markets under your own name once the user-generated markets feature is live.

The badge is visible next to your name so traders can see exactly who framed the question they’re trading on.

Why now? Because we want XO Market to be a platform where real people can build trust through proven track records even during Alpha (testnet). Catalyst and verified usernames provide this. Meanwhile the weekly creation allowance keeps markets timely without turning the feed into spam.

How to Earn

We’ve kept the path simple. You’ll see a Catalyst progress card in your profile that tracks the three requirements and shows your percent complete. Finish them once, accept the creation terms, and claim your badge.

Here are the three steps:

1. Connect your X/Twitter handle: Link the social identity your audience already recognizes to your XO Market profile. This is the baseline for reputation on XO Market; it ties your activity to a verifiable identity.

2. Keep a 10 day Daily Peck-in streak: Open XO Market each day and “peck-in (a quick check-in).” Miss a day and your streak resets; do it for 10-days straight and this requirement turns green. Note: We’ve replaced Daily Claims with Peck-ins.

3. Earn 500 Conviction Points (CP): Trade, comment, refer, contribute. Hitting the CP threshold demonstrates you’re a real XO Market user.

When all three are complete, a prompt will invite you to accept the guidelines and claim your Catalyst badge. Your badge is soulbound, and is minted to your wallet. The conviction creation flow unlocks with your weekly allowance.

You’ll also see the badge on your profile (and beside your name) so the crowd can recognize who authored what.

What You Get

With Catalyst, you get a visible creator identity and the ability to publish markets on a weekly basis. Once earned, the Catalyst Badge is permanent (unless removed for policy violations), and it travels with your profile so traders can evaluate the author behind the market at a glance.

Alpha remains a closed testnet where activity builds track record: you trade with test tokens, you earn points, and your name (once verified) anchors your reputation across the feed. As we move towards mainnet, Catalyst ensures the social layer is already in place so the best ideas surface faster.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How many markets can I create with Catalyst?

You can create 1 market per week. Your quota resets on a rolling 7-day window. If you’ve already created one, your “Create Market” button will show when the next slot opens.

• Is the Catalyst Badge permanent?

Yes. Once minted, your badge is permanent and soulbound to your wallet. It will only be revoked in cases of policy violations.

• What is daily “peck-in”?

Daily peck-in replaces the old streak-claim system. Each day you log in, you “peck-in” to register activity and keep your streak alive. If you miss a day, your streak resets to zero.

• Do I get rewards for pecking every day?

Currently, peck-in contributes towards Catalyst Badge eligibility not direct daily rewards. In the future, long streaks may unlock achievement badges or other perks.

• What happens to existing users who haven’t finished their 30-day claims?

If you’ve claimed part of your tokens already, you’ll receive the remaining balance in full. Example: if you claimed 15 days out of 30, you’ll immediately get the remaining 15 days’ worth of tokens.

• What about users who already finished their 30 days claim?

You won’t receive more test tokens, but you’ll still be able to peck in daily and build progress toward the Catalyst Badge.

• How is progress tracked?

Your profile shows a Catalyst progress card with:

• Peck-in streak (e.g. 6/10 days)

• Conviction Points (e.g. 320/500 CP)

• Social proof (Twitter/X connected or not)

Once you hit 100 percent, you’ll see the option to mint your badge.

• What counts as Conviction Points (CP)?

You earn CP by trading in markets, commenting, referring friends, and contributing through quests and challenges. Reaching 500 CP proves you’re an active user.

Get Started

If you can move an audience, Catalyst gives you the switch to move a market. Earn the badge, create your markets, let the flow compound, and earn when the crowd shows up.

Start in Profile, verify your username, keep your peck-in streak alive, and stack 500 Conviction Points. Claim the badge and you’re off to the races.

Ready to get started? Jump into XO Market Alpha, grab your invite code (XO-AURA), and get your Catalyst Badge.

Grab an invite code (XO-AURA), and join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

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Join our Discord

Conviction pays. This time, literally.

We’re launching our first-ever InfoFi campaign: $50,000 in rewards for meaningful participation and contribution across XO Market, X, and Discord.

It runs on Airaa, the InfoFi platform that tracks and scores contributions across socials and onchain.

Every conviction, every post, and every reply is captured and rewarded.

Why This Matters

XO Market isn’t just about trading outcomes. It’s about conviction. The people who surface insights, challenge ideas, and bring markets to life.

This campaign makes that loop visible and rewards it. It combines your social contributions with your onchain activity multipliers. The more you contribute, the higher you climb, and the bigger your share of the pot.

The best part is that you are not just earning once. Conviction Points still reward everything you do inside XO Market. With Conviction Aura, those same actions are counted again, now together with your posts on X and your contributions in Discord.

How Contributions Are Tracked

All of your activity earns Aura points, scored by Airaa. Aura points measure the quality of your contributions, not just quantity, and then apply an onchain multiplier based on your XO Market usage.

Your score comes from three places:

• On X: Relevance, originality, and quality of posts about XO Market (insights, threads, discussions).

• On Discord: Meaningful participation, helping others, asking sharp questions, joining debates.

• On XO Market: Placing convictions(trades), creating markets, linking accounts, liking, leaving comments, and daily check-ins.

The formula is simple:

(X contributions + Discord contributions) × XO Market usage

Put simply, the more conviction you show on XO Market, and the more you contribute on X and Discord, the more points you’ll earn.

The Leaderboard

All activity feeds into a live leaderboard on Airaa that is:

• Updated daily

• Transparent to everyone

• Clear about exactly where you stand

How It Works

1. Connect your X + Discord to Airaa

2. Link the same X account you‘ve connected to XO Market

3. Contribute across X, Discord, and XO Market to climb the leaderboard

That’s it. Airaa does the tracking for you.

Campaign Details

• Duration: 6 weeks, starting 1st September 2025, ending 14 October 2025.

• Rewards: $50,000 total

• $20,000 in USDC

• $30,000 in future XO Market Tokens

• Distribution:

FAQs

Do I need to connect a wallet?
No. Only X + Discord. XO Market usage is tracked through your linked X, so don’t forget to link your XO Market account to your X.

How often is the leaderboard updated?
Daily.

What kind of posts count as meaningful?
Relevant, original, and thoughtful content about XO Market. Memes are welcome if they spark value or discussion.

Examples
Market insights: “Here’s why I believe the market about Apple’s new product launch is underpriced”

Community debates: “Is open market creation good or bad for liquidity?”

Explainers: “How LS-LMSR works”

Get Started

Every contribution matters. Whether you’re trading on XO Market, posting insights on X, or helping someone in Discord, it all counts toward your share of $50,000.

👉 Link your account on Airaa and start contributing today.

New to XO Market? Use this invite code to get in: XO-AURA

If codes are full, sign up for the waitlist here.

Conviction pays. Let’s see yours.

A contested referee call. An ambiguous press release. A late-night data update.

This is where disputes come in. And if you’ve ever wondered what happens when traders disagree with the official result, you’re not alone.

In prediction markets, resolution has always been the weak link. Outcomes get delayed, juries get manipulated, liquidity gets frozen.

XO takes a different approach. It’s a system designed from the ground up to feel simple on the surface, while underneath combining automation and human judgment in a way that makes disputes rare, fast, and fair.

What Counts as a Dispute?

A dispute is not about vibes, opinions, or regrets. It’s about facts. Did the thing happen, exactly as the market description laid out, or not?

If the Federal Reserve did cut rates on September 17th, and the market resolved “No,” that’s a dispute. If a market said “BTC > $120,000 before September,” and the blockchain shows it crossed $120K in mid-August, that’s a dispute.

What it’s not:

• “I don’t like how the odds moved.”

• “I think the market question should have been worded differently.”

• “I lost money, so I want another shot.”

Disputes are narrow by design. They exist to protect conviction markets from error, not to reopen the trade.

How XO Market Resolves Them

Resolution on XO runs in layers. The goal is speed where possible, human judgment where needed.

1. AI check: Specialized resolver agents pull in trusted sources and propose an outcome within minutes. For most markets, this is the end of the story - fast, efficient, and clean.

2. Dispute window: If you think that outcome is wrong, you can raise a challenge by bonding a small amount. That alone is enough to escalate the case.

3. Human jury: A pseudorandom panel of jurors is drawn to review the evidence dossier. Their incentives are aligned: vote honestly, or risk losing your stake.

4. Final decision: The jury vote locks the outcome. Payouts flow, the ledger updates, and the market moves forward.

The effect: no endless purgatory, no locked liquidity, and no whales quietly buying influence behind the curtain.

Building Markets that Hold Up

Not all proof is equal. The strongest disputes lean on primary evidence: official government releases, blockchain records, weather service data. Secondary material - screenshots, news articles, timestamped posts - can help, but they’re supporting actors, not the star.

What matters most is clarity. Keep submissions verifiable, linked to the original source, and free of spin. The sharper the evidence, the faster the jury converges.

The best way to avoid disputes altogether is to prevent ambiguity at the source. That’s on market creators. They have to:

• Write rules that leave no wiggle room.

• Define the data source up front.

• Spell out what counts as “Yes” or “No.”

• Give enough time for fact-checking before resolution.

Ambiguity breeds disputes. Clarity makes them rare.

Why Our Approach is Different

Most oracle systems hit the resolver trilemma: you can maximize decentralization, security, or efficiency - but never all three at once.

Token-weighted systems lean decentralized but are easily hijacked when participation is thin. Multi-round juries protect security but freeze liquidity with endless delays. Small committees resolve quickly but rely on trust in a handful of signers.

XO Market’s approach breaks out of that bind by splitting resolution into fast and adversarial paths. Clear, objective cases resolve in seconds through parallel agents with confidence gating, leaving behind an auditable dossier. Ambiguous or contested cases escalate into a decentralized court that scales its defenses with the value at stake.

Instead of choosing which corner of the trilemma to give up, XO routes each case to the right path: efficient when it can be, secure when it must be.

Trade with Confidence

Markets are only as strong as their resolution layer. If traders can’t trust outcomes, everything else collapses.

On XO Market, you can. Disputes are transparent, evidence-driven, and settled quickly. Creators get tools to design clearer markets. Traders get confidence that their convictions won’t be undercut by vague wording or shady influence.

The result is what conviction markets were always meant to be: a place where beliefs become assets, and outcomes are priced by the crowd - not distorted by the weakest link in the chain.

Ready to get started? Jump into XO Alpha, grab your invite code, and see the CrowdFeed in action.

Grab an invite code and join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

Follow us on Twitter

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That loop has a tight latency budget. We need low costs, fast confirmations, and the ability to tune the chain around our market mechanics rather than shaping the product around someone else’s infrastructure.

That’s why XO Market was never going to be running on a general-purpose blockchain. Our platform needed to behave like an app, but with the guarantees that make on-chain systems credible.

Celestia gives us that, providing data availability and consensus while XO Network operates as a sovereign network, providing execution and settlement. In practice, Celestia makes deploying XO feel less like shipping a blockchain and more like spinning up an app on AWS or Google Cloud.

If you’re new to modular networks, the diagram below shows exactly how we’ve divided responsibilities:

Source: An Introduction to Sovereign Rollups

In our configuration, the top two layers (execution, settlement) live on the Evolve powered XO Network, while the data availability + consensus layer is on Celestia. The result is lower and more predictable costs, as well as the freedom to adapt execution and settlement without breaking trust.

How Celestia Works

Monolithic chains fold execution and data availability into one blockspace auction. The result is that you pay not only for your own transactions, but for everyone else’s as well, and verification becomes heavier than most consumer devices can handle.

For a market feed, that’s a non-starter. What we need instead is a network that prices by bytes, not by execution contention, and verification that’s efficient.

Rather than trying to be everything, Celestia narrows its scope to providing a base layer for consensus and data availability. Rollups like ours publish data as blobs through PayForBlobs, paying only for the footprint we take up. Here’s what “pay for bytes, not gas” looks like at the block-producer level.

On the other side of the equation, anyone can verify that the data really is available without needing to download the whole block. The magic is in two design primitives.

**1. Data Availability Sampling: **The reason we can keep verification light without hand-waving is the way Celestia encodes blocks. Every block’s data is split into fixed-size shares, arranged into a square, and then extended with two-dimensional Reed-Solomon parity. Then instead of downloading the whole thing, light nodes can ask the network for a handful of random shares. If those random samples decode cleanly, the odds that any part of the block is missing fall off fast as you increase the number of samples. The net effect is that anyone can verify that market data is available at any time.

Source: Celestia’s Data Availability Layer

Sampling doesn’t replace full nodes; it complements them. Full nodes still reconstruct and serve history, but everyone else can independently check liveness and availability from lightweight clients. It’s also why our gasless UX isn’t a trust trade-off; the cost of posting is on us, and the cost of verifying stays low for everyone else.

**2. Namespaced Merkle Trees: **In a traditional Merkle tree, a proof tells you that some leaf is in the tree; it doesn’t tell you that you’ve seen all the leaves for a particular market. Celestia’s namespaced Merkle tree tags each internal node with the min/max namespace covered beneath it and keeps leaves ordered by namespace.

That lets a client request proofs for “everything in xo.market.trades this block” or any other lane and get a compact range proof that no trades were skipped.

Source: Celestia’s Data Availability Layer

Indexers and clients pull only the namespaces they care about and still get completeness guarantees for that lane. Indexers don’t need global scans, explorers don’t need heuristics to guess what’s missing, audits of resolver history are deterministic pull-requests against a namespace. It’s cleaner and faster to reason about under load.

On top of that sits Blobstream. Celestia relays its block commitments into Ethereum, where our settlement contracts check that a rollup batch corresponds to data that really exists on Celestia.

We run as a sovereign network, so Blobstream is an integration choice, not a settlement dependency. When we need to project DA attestations to Ethereum — for bridges, audits, or partners — this is the path.

The Architecture We Run

Execution lives on an Evolve-based sovereign network. That gives us control over the VM, mempool policy, and scheduling, letting us tune the system specifically for conviction markets.

Data availability is Celestia’s domain; we publish blobs, pay for bytes, and let DAS keep verification light for users. Verification is split into two lanes:

• Light Nodes: They do the sampling work across recent Celestia blocks, giving end-users confidence on consumer hardware.

• Archival nodes: Both ours and community-run, preserve deep history for explorers, disputes, and research.

Independent watchers track namespace completeness and raise alarms if something looks off.

Sovereignty also lets us solve one of crypto’s biggest UX cliffs: gas. Because we own execution, we can sponsor fees. We use fee-grant/relayer infrastructure and mempool policy tuned for our workloads so traders never sign or pay network gas; only XO platform fees apply.

Overall, the design keeps our options open. If we decide to add another execution environment or plug into a bridge that wants on-chain data availability attestations, we can do so without refactoring the foundation.

Celestia remains the invariant; everything above it is product surface area we can iterate.

Costs and Incentives

In practice, data availability is the biggest line item for a network like ours. Every post, every piece of evidence, every resolver message, all of it adds up. If costs spike, that makes it more costly for us to run XO Market.

Our interest in Celestia isn’t abstract theory; it’s unit economics. Byte-priced blobs mean cost scales with our footprint and not with global execution congestion.

Ethereum calldata remains the gold standard for durability, but it’s too expensive for a feed that thrives on high-volume, low-value chatter. EIP-4844 blobs are a major step forward, but they are deliberately temporary, pruned after a short window.

Ultimately, all data availability options for Ethereum L2s balance cost against security, with cheaper solutions scaling better, while stronger guarantees come at a higher gas expense. Calldata is durable but expensive; EIP-4844 blobs are cheap but intentionally short-lived, optimized for challenge windows rather than long-memory feeds. That’s great for challenge games; it’s less ideal as the canonical history of a social + markets feed.

Celestia, by contrast, is designed for sustained throughput with sampling as the default verification story, and we pair it with our own archival to keep deep history accessible.

There are other data availability projects worth watching. But our bias is toward whatever keeps creators posting and traders tapping without us having to think about costs. Celestia’s namespaces and cost profile are already proven for that. We handle archival and adopt its validator/DAS model so users only ever see our platform fee, not network friction.

What This Unlocks For Us

The long tail is where conviction markets get interesting. Niche events, local politics, offbeat narratives — things too fast-moving for traditional prediction markets to catch.

If posting is cheap and indexing is clean, creators can launch first and let liquidity catch up. That’s how you capture the pulse of culture in real time. Celestia’s pricing model and namespaces make that practical; our gasless design removes the last mile of friction so onboarding feels like any modern app.

With DAS, a mobile client can check availability without carrying the weight of a full node. Namespaces mean clients and explorers subscribe to exactly the slices they need and know they’re complete.

This is the control plane that makes the UX feel like an app without centralizing the trust model. XO Market runs execution on our Evolve-based sovereign network; Celestia handles ordering and data availability.

It’s the same mental shift that lets Web2 apps scale; separate what you build from the infrastructure that secures it. For us, that means conviction trading can scale like a consumer app — fast to deploy, easy to iterate — but with on-chain verifiability baked in at the base layer.

This is the mental model to hold while you use XO Market:

Source: Sovereign Rollups an Introduction

Our resolver stack benefits as well. Disputes only stay legitimate if the evidence trail is clear, complete, and tamper-evident. By keeping rules, evidence, and verdicts in their own namespaces, we make it possible for anyone to reconstruct a case with deterministic proofs.

The Bottom Line

Conviction markets live or die by their UX. If publishing is expensive, the loop slows. If verification is heavyweight, trust breaks. If execution and availability are fused together, we lose the flexibility to adapt. Celestia solves those constraints by making data abundant, verifiable, and modular, as well as sovereignty where UX decisions matter most.

With this stack under the hood, the user flow stays tight and anyone, anywhere, can prove to themselves that it’s real. Execution details may evolve as our roadmap expands, but the DA guarantees and the gasless UX won’t. That’s why we chose Celestia.

Ready to get started? Jump into XO Alpha, grab your invite code, and see the CrowdFeed in action.

Grab an invite code join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

Today we’re launching verified accounts - a simple way to connect your Twitter/X to your XO profile and claim your username so people know it’s you when you trade, create markets, and climb the leaderboard.

This does three things at once:

1. Brings your existing social identity into XO so others can quickly recognize your convictions and markets created.

2. Displays your reputation as a trader or creator clearly across CrowdFeed, markets, and the leaderboard.

3. Establishes a social layer of trust that powers discovery and growth for new markets.

It’s a small switch with big effects for trust and discovery.

How To Claim

The flow is simple. Start out by visiting the XO Market Alpha:

1. Step 1: On the XO Market Alpha, navigate to your profile and tap “Verify”.

2. Step 2: In the pop up tap “Yes, I agree” and confirm as prompted in the Privy window.

3. Step 3: Confirm the handle and hit Claim my username.

Once completed you’ll see your XO Market profile now carries your verified Twitter/X @handle. The banner disappears, the badge appears, and your points update.

What You Unlock

Claiming your username does three things immediately:

• Name integrity: Your @handle is reserved on XO, which shuts down impersonation before it starts.

• Early Access: Verification also gives early access to new features, such as Market Creation.

• Conviction points: Connect and earn 10 points toward your total. Points sit alongside your PnL and rank and will matter after Alpha.

For creators, if you have distribution, your handle is your brand. Share a market on X and the people who follow you there will recognize you here. If it runs, the fees and the reputation flow back to the same name.

For traders, it makes every quick take on CrowdFeed easier to judge because it comes from someone you can actually look up.

Why This Matters

Ideas move when credible voices say them out loud and other people respond. When those voices are anonymous, discovery gets noisy and the best markets take longer to catch on.

Claiming your username gives every trade, comment, and market a clear source.

The feed feels more human. Reputation becomes recognizable. And when open market creation rolls out, the social layer will already be in place so new markets earn trust on day one.

This is social proof for conviction trading.

Get Started

XO Alpha remains (for now) a closed, risk-free testnet. You trade with test tokens, you climb the leaderboard on performance and activity, and you earn points for doing.

Claiming your username strengthens that loop. It establishes a social layer of trust and sets us up for the next phase. As we roll into open market creation, verified handles will help the best ideas surface faster and keep the feed sharper.

Claim your username now. Connect X, earn your points, and bring social proof to your markets.

Grab an invite code and join the Alpha

Check out our new Website

Follow us on Twitter

Add our Substack

Join our Discord