How It Works

Ticker Tok runs a continuous sequence of 30-second prediction rounds on-chain. Each round has a fixed open window, a locked price snapshot, and a final close price that determines winners.

Game Mechanics

At its core, Ticker Tok is a binary prediction market: you pick a direction (TICK for up, TOK for down), stake BNB, and find out the result 30 seconds later.

Unlike pool-based prediction markets where winnings depend on how many others picked the losing side, Ticker Tok uses a fixed payout model. Every winner receives exactly 1.9× their stake — regardless of how many others bet, or which direction they chose. Payouts are backed by the house liquidity in MoonDoomVault (provided by the team).

Round Lifecycle

Every round progresses through four phases, each triggered by the Keeper Bot calling executeRound() on-chain.

Phase 1 — Open (LIVE)

A new round starts with an open betting window. Players can submit betMoon(epoch) or betDoom(epoch) transactions. The round remains open until the keeper calls executeRound() for the first time in that epoch.

Phase 2 — Lock

When the keeper calls executeRound(), the current round is locked. The contract fetches the current BTC/USD price from the Pyth oracle and records it as the lockPrice. No new bets are accepted after this point. Simultaneously, the previous round is ended and settled.

Phase 3 — End & Settle

On the next executeRound() call (~30 seconds later), the contract records the current price as the closePrice for the locked round. It compares closePrice vs lockPrice and sets the round outcome:

Genesis Rounds

When the game first starts (or restarts after being paused), the keeper must call two special functions before the main loop begins:

1. genesisStartRound() — opens the very first round
2. genesisLockRound(priceUpdate) — locks the first round with a seed price

After that, the regular executeRound() loop takes over indefinitely.

Price Oracle

Ticker Tok uses the Pyth Network BTC/USD price feed as its on-chain oracle. Pyth provides a pull-based model: rather than the oracle pushing prices on-chain continuously, the caller provides a signed price update (a price attestation) in the transaction itself.

The keeper bot fetches these attestations from the Pyth Hermes WebSocket service and passes them as bytes[] calldata priceUpdate to every executeRound() call. The contract verifies the attestation on-chain before accepting the price.

Frontend Price Feed

The frontend independently streams prices for the live chart using a three-tier fallback strategy:

1. Pyth Hermes WebSocket — real-time feed at up to 20 Hz with EMA smoothing for chart rendering
2. Pyth REST polling — falls back to polling every 1 second if WebSocket drops
3. Simulation — synthetic price walk if both feeds are unavailable (useful in dev/Sim Mode)

Payouts & Winnings

Fixed Multiplier Model

Ticker Tok uses a fixed 1.9× multiplier (also written as 19000 basis points in the contract). This differs from pool-based designs where payout depends on how much is on the losing side.

Vault-Backed Payouts

When a player wins and calls claim(epoch), the MoonDoom contract sends the payout (stake × 1.9 BNB) to the player's wallet. When a player loses, their stake is sent to the vault as house profit.

Betting Limits