How markets resolve

Proposer-first, four-hour window

When a market reaches its deadline, a proposer submits a candidate outcome and posts a small proposer bond. A four-hour challenge window opens. If nobody disputes within those four hours, the proposed outcome finalizes and the market settles. The proposer’s bond is returned.

Clear questions with clear evidence resolve here — most markets do, in a single four-hour window, with no vote and no jury.

Disputes route to Thres Oracle

If a challenger disputes the proposed outcome — posting a counter-bond — the resolution is handed off to Thres Oracle. A weighted jury of staked Thres Oracle participants casts encrypted ballots in a single voting round, time-locked: a ballot cannot be decrypted by anyone (including the juror who cast it) until the round closes.

Incentives mirror Polymarket’s relationship with UMA. Jurors earn Thres Oracle tokens for participating and resolving correctly. On top of that, the market creator posts a resolver reward when escalating to jury — so jurors are paid by the market they’re resolving.

When the round closes, the decryption key is released by Drand (see below), every ballot is decrypted at once, and the outcome with the higher stake-weighted total wins. Unlike UMA’s commit-reveal cycle, dispute resolution finishes in a single round — no second-phase reveal, no second attendance, no vote suppression.

And for the rare market where the dispute cycle still cannot converge — when a question is genuinely ambiguous and several rounds in a row fail to reach a verdict — Thres Oracle reserves an admin-escalation backstop: after five failed attempts on the same question, resolution can be lifted to an admin call.

Thres Oracle, in turn, runs on Drand

Time-locked encryption needs a public source of unpredictable, signed entropy that no single party controls. Thres Oracle uses Drand — a randomness beacon operated by the League of Entropy, a coalition of universities, infrastructure providers, and open-source contributors that together publish a verifiable random value every three seconds.

When a juror encrypts a ballot, the encryption is tied to a Drand round number in the future. The corresponding decryption key is only releasable once Drand reaches that round and publishes its signature — and because Drand’s threshold signing scheme requires a supermajority of independent operators to cooperate, no single party can release the key early or withhold it.

So the stack reads simply: Tāhuna depends on Thres Oracle for resolution, Thres Oracle depends on Drand for the time-lock beacon. Both Thres Oracle and Drand are independent open-source projects.