How betting works on Foresee

Every bet on Foresee happens in two taps: pick a side, confirm your stake. But between those taps, a genuinely elegant machine runs, the same one real prediction markets use. Here's the whole thing in plain words, because betting is more fun when you can see the gears.

Every market is two jars

Behind every question sits a market maker, not a person, a formula, holding two jars: a jar of YES-shares and a jar of NO-shares. The percent you see is simply the balance between the jars. Even, and the market says 50%. When the YES jar runs low because people keep buying from it, YES gets expensive, and the percent climbs.

What actually happens when you stake

Say you put 25 Maura on YES at 50%. Your stake goes into the machine, and it hands back YES-shares while keeping one rule intact: the two jar sizes, multiplied together, never change. Run the real numbers and your 25 buys about 46 shares, each worth exactly 1 Maura if YES happens.

And because your trade drained the YES jar a little, the price is now about 58%, not 50%. You didn't just bet on the market, you moved it. Every stake is also a vote, which is why a prediction market's number stays honest: it's made entirely of people putting something on the line.

Price impact: the honest liquidity meter

Before you confirm, Foresee shows exactly what your stake will do, “moves the odds 62% → 64%.” That little arrow is doing serious work. In a deep market (big jars, lots of liquidity), your stake barely ripples. In a thin one, the same stake jumps the number, and the machine quietly charges you more per share as you push, so your own average price worsens too.

Real-money exchanges like Polymarket and Kalshi show this as an order book, ladders of offers your bet eats through. Same economics, more furniture. We compress it into the one number that matters before you tap confirm.

Who takes the other side?

On an order-book exchange, your bet waits until a human wants the opposite side at your price. On Foresee, the jars themselves are the counterparty, seeded when the market opens and topped up by the house. That means a market with three players works exactly as well as one with three thousand: there is always a price, and it is always tradeable. No queue, no “order pending.”

Why the payout depends on the odds

Backing a 62% favorite pays about 1.6×. Backing a 20% longshot that comes true pays about 5×. Nothing arbitrary there, the price is the probability, so the payout is just 1 divided by what you paid. The market rewards being right precisely in proportion to how hard it was to be right.

Why this design is good for you

• No vig. Sportsbooks bake a house edgeinto their odds so they win either way. Our percents sum to 100 and the house takes nothing, it's play money; there's nothing to take.
• Whales can't bully the number for free. Shoving a market 15 points means paying a terrible average price for the back half of your own bet. If the shove was wrong, the people who calmly took the other side collect. Conviction is rewarded; noise is taxed.
• No timing games against yourself.One 100 Maura stake costs exactly the same as four 25s in a row. The formula is path-independent, so you can't get chiseled by your own order splitting.
• Every Maura is accounted for. Stakes, payouts, and refunds all flow through one audited ledger, and resolved markets pay winning shares at exactly 1 Maura each. Play money, real math.

The strategy this unlocks

Since the price is the crowd's probability, there is exactly one way to profit: find numbers you believe are wrong, and be right. That makes every stake a calibration exercise, expected value against the crowd, which is why the leaderboard measures something real. Watch the impact line, favor deep markets for big convictions, hunt thin ones for mispriced longshots, and let the machine keep score.