Step 01
Split
Deposit 1 USDC and the contract mints one YES and one NO token. You now hold both outcomes and are exposed to neither.
Binary contracts · settled in USDC
A dollar goes in.
A dollar comes out.
The price decides who holds it.
Barkets writes one kind of contract: will BTC/USD be above a set level at a set time? Deposit 1 USDC and you receive both sides — one YES, one NO. Trade the side you disagree with. When the deadline passes, the winning side redeems for exactly 1 USDC.
BTC/USD above $100,000 at expiry?
№ 0001
Yes
50¢
No
50¢
- Collateral
- USDC · 6 decimals
- Settlement
- Winner redeems 1.000000
- Network
- Arc · chain 5042002
- Gas paid in
- USDC
Prices are the market's implied probability and always sum to $1.00. A ticket priced at 34¢ pays $1.00 if it resolves in your favour.
Mechanism
Four steps, and the maths never leaves the contract.
Every USDC deposited is held until someone redeems it. The pool cannot pay out more than it took in, and it cannot pay out less.
Step 02
Trade
Sell the side you disagree with into the pool. What you get back is the market's current price for that outcome.
Step 03
Settle
After the deadline the resolver records the BTC/USD price on chain. Above the strike, YES wins. At or below it, NO wins.
Step 04
Redeem
Burn the winning token, take 1 USDC. The losing token is worth nothing. Nobody has to be online for this to hold.
Why Arc
Built on a chain where the gas token is the collateral.
Arc is Circle's Layer 1. USDC is the native asset, so fees are denominated in dollars and a trader never needs a second token to close a position.
506 MS
Block time
Deterministic finality on inclusion. A trade is settled when the block lands, not several confirmations later.
20 GWEI
Fixed base fee
No fee auction to lose. Closing a position costs roughly the same whether the market is quiet or busy.
USDC
Native gas token
Costs are priced in dollars, and the money used to pay them is the same money the contract is denominated in.
Deployment
Everything below is on chain right now.
Barkets is on Arc Testnet while settlement is being proven end to end. Verify the addresses yourself rather than taking this page's word for it.
- Status
- Testnet · contracts deployed
- Network
- Arc Testnet — chain ID 5042002
- First market
- 0x4E303fBc9939d0cD41DB7fD3ec64ba2A4eD59523
- Collateral
- USDC — 0x3600000000000000000000000000000000000000
- Not yet done
- Independent audit · mainnet deployment · public trading interface