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Timely turns measurable real-world durations into two-sided markets. Each market has a reference — the most recent published measurement — and asks a single question: will the next published measurement be higher or lower than it?

You are not predicting a value. There is no reward for being close and no penalty for being far. A market has exactly two tradable outcomes, MORE and LESS, and one shared pool split between them.

This is a market primitive around duration, not a general prediction market with a new label. Everything below follows from that.

Every market carries the same fields, whatever it measures:

referenceValue is not the same field as currentValue. They are equal while a market is open and they separate at lock: the reference freezes, the current value keeps updating. Confusing the two is the easiest way to misread a position.

A market can only exist where a source genuinely publishes on a schedule. A duration nobody measures, or measures irregularly, cannot be listed.

A market resolves against one number: the next measurement published by its named source, at its stated cadence. Not an average, not a revision, not a corrected figure released afterwards — the first official publication after lock.

The magnitude of the move never matters. A market with a 42-minute reference resolves MORE at 43 and MORE at 67, and pays both identically.

Timely does not resolve a market from an unpublished number. If a source misses its window the market stays in OBSERVING until the source publishes or the market is voided.

One market, one pool, two sides. When you enter, your stake joins a side. The split between sides is the market’s own pricing — no order book, no counterparty, no maker.

impliedProbability(side) = sidePool / (morePool + lessPool)

payout(position) = position
                 + (position / winningPool) * losingPool * (1 - fee)

A 6.4 / 3.6 split prices MORE at 64¢ and LESS at 36¢. That is a statement about where money currently sits, not a forecast from anywhere else.

Entering dilutes your own side. A large stake into a thin side moves the price against itself, and any quote shown to you accounts for this by including your entry in the denominator before showing a number.

A position is a stake on one side of one market, taken against the reference in force when it was entered. Positions are not transferable and cannot be closed early — there is no secondary market and no exit before resolution.

You may hold positions on both sides of the same market. They settle independently, and holding both is not a hedge that returns your stake, because the losing side pays the protocol fee.

A position’s displayed value is its share of its own side multiplied by the opposing pool, net of fee, plus the stake itself. It changes whenever anyone enters either side.

Timely connects to an EIP-1193 browser wallet. It requests accounts, reads the chain id and balance, and asks for a signature only when you submit an entry or claim a settlement.

Timely never asks for a seed phrase or a private key, and there is no server-side account. Positions and activity are read from the connected wallet.

Account and chain changes are handled live: switching accounts in the wallet re-reads the balance, and switching networks moves the app into its wrong-network state immediately.

Timely operates on one mainnet and no other network. There is no network selector anywhere in the product, because there is nothing to select. Ethereum mainnet, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon and Solana are all unsupported, and no testnet or local network is configured in any build.

If your wallet is on any other chain a banner appears, market interactions are disabled, and the only action offered is switching to the supported network. Switching uses wallet_switchEthereumChain, falling back to wallet_addEthereumChain when the wallet does not yet know the chain.

After a market resolves, winning positions claim. Settlement is a pull, not a push: nothing arrives in your wallet until you claim it, and an unclaimed settlement is not lost.

A winner receives their own stake back plus a proportional share of the losing pool net of the protocol fee. A holder of one tenth of the winning side receives one tenth of the distributed amount.

Losing positions receive nothing. There is no partial credit for a near miss, because there is no such thing as a near miss in a directional market.

Stated in full, because an ambiguous resolution rule is a defect.

The measurement equals the reference exactly

The market voids. Neither side wins, every stake is returned in full, and no protocol fee is taken. This is the only outcome in which nobody is paid, and it is shown on the market page rather than buried here.

The source publishes late

The market stays in OBSERVING. It does not resolve on an estimate, and it does not resolve on the previous number.

The source never publishes

The market voids and stakes are returned. A market that cannot be resolved from its stated source is not resolved from another one.

The source revises a published number

Resolution uses the first official publication after lock. A later revision does not reopen a settled market.

One side has no stake at lock

There is no losing pool to distribute, so there is nothing to win. Stakes on the single populated side are returned in full and no fee is taken.

The source changes its methodology

The market is voided rather than resolved across a definitional break, and a new market is listed against the new methodology.

A protocol fee of 2% is taken from the losing pool at settlement, and only at settlement.

• There is no fee to enter a market.
• There is no fee on a winner’s returned stake.
• There is no fee on a voided market.
• Gas is paid to the network by your wallet, and is not Timely’s.

• Timely never requests a seed phrase or private key.
• Transactions are signed in your wallet, never in this interface.
• A transaction is reported as confirmed only when the network has confirmed it. Nothing in this product produces a transaction hash it did not receive.
• Market resolution depends on an external source. That is a trust assumption, not an absence of one — Timely is not an oracle-free system.
• No key, token or deployment credential is present in the client. A contract address is public by nature and is the only address it holds.

The instruments drifting behind the site are third-party models obtained from Poly Pizza, used under the licences below. Nine of the ten are CC-BY, which requires that their authors be credited; this section is that credit.

The models are used unmodified apart from being centred and scaled to a common size at runtime, which the licences permit. Charts use TradingView’s Lightweight Charts (Apache-2.0), and duration data comes from Transport for London. Type is Outfit and DM Mono, both under the SIL Open Font License.