How markets resolve
Tahuna runs the markets. Deciding a question market's outcome is the job of OTER (Optimistic Truth Engine on Radix), a separate oracle that Tahuna depends on. A price market does not use it: a signed price feed settles each window.
A bonded answer and a four-hour window
When a market reaches its deadline, a proposer submits an outcome and posts a bond. A four-hour challenge window opens. If nobody disputes the answer in those four hours, it becomes final, the market settles and the proposer gets the bond back.
A question with a clear answer and clear evidence should end here, with no vote at all.
A dispute goes to a vote of OTER stakers
To dispute an answer, a challenger posts a bond of their own. The question then goes to OTER, whose stakers vote on it. Each staker may cast one encrypted ballot in the round, weighted by the OTER staked behind it. The ballot is time-locked: nobody, the staker included, can read it until the round closes.
Stakers who vote with the settled outcome earn OTER and a share of the losing bond, and stakers on the wrong side are slashed. The person who listed the market also funded a reward when the question was posted; it goes to the side whose bond wins.
When the round closes, drand releases the decryption key (see below) and every ballot opens at once. The leading outcome settles the market if it holds at least 70% of the revealed stake; short of that, the question goes to another round. A staker votes once: when the key is out, OTER's reveal service opens every ballot and submits the reveals, so there is no second visit to open your own.
For the rare question where round after round falls short, OTER does not hand the outcome to an admin. After three attempts without a verdict the question reopens on a cooldown: six hours before the next attempt, doubling each time up to thirty days. Both bonds are refunded after each round that produced no verdict. A round with no verdict delays the market but never voids it. A question can still settle as a draw or as invalid, and then each YES and NO share pays 0.50 hUSDC.
The time lock comes from drand
A time-locked ballot needs a public source of signed, unpredictable values that no single party controls. OTER uses drand, run by the League of Entropy: universities, infrastructure providers and open-source contributors who together publish a verifiable random value every three seconds.
A staker's ballot is encrypted to a drand round in the future. The key that opens it exists only once drand reaches that round and publishes its signature. Drand's threshold signing needs most of its independent operators to cooperate, so no single party can release the key early or hold it back.
So Tahuna depends on OTER to settle questions, and OTER depends on drand for the time lock. Drand is an independent open-source project; OTER is a separate oracle with its own stakers.