Understanding Resolution Criteria

Every prediction market eventually has to answer one question: what actually happened? That answer is called resolution, and how clearly it's defined before you ever place a position is one of the most overlooked things newcomers skip past.

A well built market states its resolution source before it opens, not after. "Will it rain in London tomorrow" is a bad market question because "rain" is ambiguous. "Will the Met Office record measurable rainfall in London between 12:00am and 11:59pm tomorrow" is a good one, because there's a single, named, checkable source everyone agreed on in advance.

Before backing any position, it's worth actually reading how a market resolves, not just what it's asking. Look for three things: a named source (not "the news" but a specific outlet or dataset), a clear time window (not "eventually" but a stated deadline), and what happens if the event genuinely can't be determined (a responsible platform voids the market and returns stakes rather than guessing).

Markets with vague resolution criteria are the ones most likely to produce disputes, and disputes are where trust in the entire mechanism breaks down. Reading resolution criteria takes thirty seconds. It's thirty seconds worth spending.