CHAPTER 5 OF 15

Where the answers come from

A market is only as good as its resolution. FIRM markets settle from evidence, not opinion, and that evidence comes from one of two places.

Company-connected data

A company can connect a supported revenue or growth provider directly, such as Stripe or Polar, or a startup revenue-aggregation service. Once connected, FIRM reads normalized totals and a measurement time from that provider. It never stores raw customer records, only the aggregate number a market actually needs. Because different providers define things differently (one provider's "active subscriptions" might include paused or past-due accounts that another provider would exclude), every market locks the exact metric definition it is using at the moment it opens, so nobody can argue after the fact about which definition applies.

Public-source data

Anyone can propose a market on a public company or project using a public, checkable source: an exchange's own listing page for a listing question, an on-chain reading for a holder-count question, a public revenue dashboard the company has opted into. This path does not require the company's participation, but it does require the source and the rule to pass review before the market can accept real trades. A pasted link by itself is not proof; the source has to be one that can be read the same way every time.

Rules fixed before trading starts

Every market fixes four things before it opens, and none of them can be edited afterward: the exact metric, the exact source, the deadline, and what counts as YES, NO, or a cancellation. This is the market's real protection against a dispute with no good answer. If the rule can already produce one clean answer from the evidence before a single trade happens, there is nothing left to argue about later.

Disputes and cancellation

When the deadline hits, the named evidence source is checked and a preliminary result is posted along with the evidence behind it. Position holders get a window to raise a dispute if they believe the evidence was misread. A dispute is decided by a reviewer who is a different party than the one who proposed the result in the first place, so the same person never both proposes and judges an outcome. Once a result clears its dispute window, it is final and payouts follow.

If the named source becomes unreachable, or the underlying definition changes so much that the original rule can no longer produce a clean answer, the market is cancelled instead of forced to a result. Open positions in a cancelled market are unwound under the rule that was published when the market opened, not decided after the fact.

What participation is allowed

FIRM markets are about real companies and real projects, and real people can take real actions that move the number: referring a customer, buying the product, sharing the market to bring in more traders. That is disclosed upfront, market by market, rather than treated as manipulation. A market that wants to restrict this says so in its rules before it opens.