Protocol

Settlement & authoritative sources

Thassa markets never settle on open-ended LLM web search. Every market resolves against known authoritative sources, bound at creation and disclosed publicly, stored onchain, rendered in the app, and served by the API.

Structured settlement queries

A settlement query is structured JSON stored onchain as a public string: the question, its category, the resolution rule, and the exact sources that decide it.

single-source settlement query

{
  "question": "Will it rain in San Francisco on 2026-07-18?",
  "category": "weather",
  "rule": "single",
  "sources": [
    {
      "id": "nws",
      "name": "NWS/NOAA",
      "url": "https://api.weather.gov"
    }
  ]
}

Anyone can inspect the query that will settle a market, in the app’s market detail (“Advanced”), or via GET /trade-api/v1/markets/{id}/sources.

The rule of thumb

Encoded in the registry

Numeric data ⇒ exactly one publicly-disclosed source. Boolean data ⇒ multi-source majority concurrence.

Scores, temperatures, and prices are facts one authority publishes; naming a single source publicly is both sufficient and unambiguous. “Did X happen” questions are interpretations, so no single outlet decides them: a panel must concur.

Source categories

Category	Rule	Sources
`sports`	`single`	ESPN, the single primary source for results.
`news`	`majority`	Boolean “did X happen” questions. Panel of NYT, WSJ, Reuters, AP, BBC (configurable list); a majority must concur or no update is produced.
`weather`	`single`	Numeric. Exactly one allowed authoritative source, default NWS/NOAA (`api.weather.gov`).
`price`	`single`	Asset pricing, numeric. Exactly one allowed source per asset class, default Coinbase spot for crypto, configurable per deployment.
`general`	—	Fallback for uncategorized questions: LLM adjudication, clearly labeled as such.

The majority-concurrence rule

majority settlement query

{
  "question": "Did the bill pass the Senate before 2026-07-01?",
  "category": "news",
  "rule": "majority",
  "sources": [
    { "id": "nyt",     "name": "The New York Times",  "url": "https://www.nytimes.com" },
    { "id": "wsj",     "name": "The Wall Street Journal", "url": "https://www.wsj.com" },
    { "id": "reuters", "name": "Reuters",             "url": "https://www.reuters.com" },
    { "id": "ap",      "name": "Associated Press",    "url": "https://apnews.com" },
    { "id": "bbc",     "name": "BBC",                 "url": "https://www.bbc.com" }
  ]
}

For majority-rule markets, during fulfillment the node:

Fetches each panel source independently (news RSS/APIs), in the node process, prior to any LLM call.
Derives one independent verdict per source, adjudicating only from that source’s fetched evidence.
Computes concurrence in code: a majority of the panel must agree. 3 of 5 settles; 2–2 with one unavailable does not.
If there is no majority, or a source is unavailable, the node produces no update (_fulfilled=false) and retries later. The market stays SETTLING.

For single-rule markets, the one bound source decides; unavailability likewise means no update and a retry.

How sources get bound

The backend hosts the source registry and exposes it over MCP to both the market-generation agent and the oracle nodes (list_sources, resolve_sources). When a market is generated, the agent categorizes the question and binds its sources at generation time; candidates without a resolvable category fall back to general. The registry itself is publicly readable.

Prompt-injection guardrails

The oracle’s query template instructs the node to answer only the market question passed via bid inputData, returning strictly the expected shape and refusing instructions embedded in the question.
The LLM adjudicates only from evidence the node fetched, it has no browsing or tools at settlement time.
Market generation sanitizes user input, wraps it in delimited data blocks, schema-validates output, and requires settlement queries to be objective, verifiable statements with a resolution source and date.

When settlement can’t happen

A market that can never resolve cleanly can be voided by the owner (voidMarket), status VOID, all deposits refundable. Until then, an unresolvable query simply keeps producing no update: funds stay escrowed and safe, never settled on a bad answer.

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