Risks
Everything that can go against you.
Read this before staking anything. These are not boilerplate; they are the specific ways this market can go against you.
The market is reflexive
This is the big one. The signal being predicted is public and pushable: anyone can go and bid in the auction. A large YES position creates an incentive to spend money making YES true. Where a threshold is small, that can be cheap.
PolyFrog does not prevent this and does not claim to. Time weighting makes doing it late expensive, and every stake and bid is public, but the incentive is structural. Treat a low threshold with a thin market as manipulable, because it is.
Parimutuel odds move under you
You are not buying at a fixed price. Your share depends on the final composition of both pools, which keeps changing after you stake. A position that looked generous can be diluted by later money on your own side.
Thin markets
If your side wins but the losing pool is tiny, you win almost nothing. If one side is empty at settlement the market voids and you simply get your stake back — after having your capital locked for the duration.
The window can close instantly
Graduation is absorbing, so a market can close seconds after opening if the auction clears quickly. Your bet may be refused for reasons that are correct but unhelpful to you in the moment.
Thresholds are arbitrary
A creator can set a required raise of zero, in which case the auction graduates immediately and no market can exist. They can set it absurdly high so failure is certain. Graduation is not a quality signal and must never be read as one.
Gas and timing
bet() forces a checkpoint on the auction, which can be expensive when an auction has many initialised price ticks. In pathological cases a checkpoint can be costly enough to make betting impractical near the end.
Smart contract risk
The contract is unaudited. A bug could lock or lose funds. The escape hatch covers one specific failure — an auction that can never finalise — and nothing else.
Everything else
- Robinhood Chain is young; sequencer downtime would delay settlement and claims.
- Uniswap could deploy new launchpad contracts this version does not recognise.
- ETH staked is exposed to ETH price for the whole life of the market.
- You can lose your entire stake. That is the normal outcome of being wrong.
Nothing here is advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation. These are volatile markets on experimental infrastructure. Only stake what you are content to lose entirely.