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The single most important security property of any prediction market is whose number wins the round. If the operator chooses, the operator wins. Prediction Arena has structurally removed itself from that choice.

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The chain of trust

  1. Independent publishers — major exchanges, market makers, and trading firms — produce real-time prices in their own venues using their own infrastructure.
  2. They sign those prices with their own keys, keys whose security they have already invested heavily in for their own businesses.
  3. Those signed prices are aggregated and re-signed by the Pyth Network guardian set.
  4. When an Prediction Arena round needs to settle, the signed price for the round-end timestamp is fetched and submitted to our smart contract.
  5. The contract independently verifies the signature against the guardian set. If verification fails, settlement reverts. There is no fallback path.

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What we can do

  • We can pay gas to relay a signed price from the oracle network to the contract.
  • That’s it.

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What we cannot do

  • We cannot mint our own price.
  • We cannot forge an oracle signature.
  • We cannot bribe the contract to accept an unsigned number.
  • We cannot change which oracle network the contract trusts.
  • We cannot settle at a timestamp the oracle did not sign for.
  • We cannot bypass the per-market confidence-interval safety threshold.
  • We cannot settle “manually” if the oracle is down. We wait, like everyone else.

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What happens if the oracle is offline

If the oracle network goes down or stops publishing prices for an asset, settlement is delayed, not faked. Player funds remain locked in the contract during the delay. They are not at risk — they are simply waiting for a clean, signed reading. As soon as the oracle returns to normal, the round settles automatically. We have explicitly chosen this behavior over the alternative (“settle on whatever stale number is on the screen”) because we believe a delayed round is always better than a fraudulent round.

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Why we picked a first-party oracle

Many prediction platforms use “scraper” oracles — services that pull prices off public APIs and re-publish them. These have an obvious failure mode: the API can lie, the scraper can be tampered with, and the resulting price has no cryptographic relationship to the venue it allegedly came from. Prediction Arena uses a first-party oracle, where the entity publishing the price is the entity originating the price, signing it with the same keys they use for their own production trading systems. The price you see on Prediction Arena is, in a meaningful cryptographic sense, the same price the publishing exchange or market maker is showing on its own books.