Not a prediction market. Not a perpetual. Not an option. A dated, linear contract on a measurable public outcome — with margin that lives on-chain, not in a venue's custody.
What It Is Not
What It Is
A prediction market (binary yes/no)
A time-series tracking dated futures contract
A perpetual future (no expiry)
A dated future with a fixed settlement date
An option (non-linear payoff)
A linear (delta-one) payoff on a measurable public outcome
Venue-custodied collateral
On-chain margin in the DCC — portable across venues
Source: CoinDesk, July 28, 2025. Forecast contracts move one-to-one with an underlying factor and carry a symmetrical payoff; a prediction market instead pays out once and the market ends there. A sequence of futures on an underlying data series, by contrast, can continue indefinitely.
AFP vs. POLYMARKET vs. KALSHI 12 entries
Feature
AFP
Polymarket
Kalshi
*Binary Prediction Markets were deployed on AFP starting in Season 4 (see Page 6, Stage 3) — before that, AFP offered continuous Forecast Futures only. Real deployed examples, confirmed from AutEx's own product list: WOMHUSA26 / WOMHCAN26 ("United States wins Milano Cortina 2026 Men's Ice Hockey gold" / "Canada wins..."), and SBPATRIOTS26 / SBSEAHAWKS26 ("New England Patriots win Super Bowl LX" / "Seattle Seahawks win..."). Same underlying DCC and clearing as any Forecast Future — a different payoff shape, not a different system.
AFP and Polymarket both settle on-chain via smart contracts, but their contract types diverge sharply: Polymarket and Kalshi solve binary yes/no outcomes on discrete events, while AFP lets forecasters trade arbitrary, recurring time-series data.
Beyond the CPI example above, launched Forecast Futures have included Weekly Jobless Claims, US GDP, and US Unemployment Rate — each a dated contract settling to the actual reported figure.
Source: CoinDesk, July 28, 2025 (same interview cited above). Singapore's Certificate of Entitlement — the auction-priced quota that owning a car there requires — is a real-world risk factor nobody can currently hedge. It's a public, auction-set number with no derivatives market behind it: exactly the kind of measurable, recurring time series a Forecast Future is built to track, and a working illustration of AFP's pitch that permissionless contract creation extends past crypto and financial indexes into everyday public data. This one shipped: COE1G26, COE1H26, COE2G26, and COE2H26 (Category A COE, Feb/Mar 2026, Bidding Rounds 1 and 2) were all live on AutEx's Season 4 product list — not just a hypothetical from the interview.
STAGE 1B
Payoff Diagram
Drag the settlement marker along the axis. Watch a linear Forecast Future keep scaling with the surprise while a binary Prediction Market only cares which side of the line the outcome landed on.
Drag the white diamond, click anywhere on the chart, or focus it and use ← → (hold Shift for bigger steps).
SETTLEMENT3.0%
FORECAST FUTURE+0 USDZ (linear — keeps scaling)
BINARY MARKET+0 USDZ
Educational only. The Track B tool ain:at-01 is the practitioner's instrument, with validation, range checking, and OCG artifact emission.
"A Forecast Future's payoff keeps scaling with the size of the surprise. A binary Prediction Market only cares which side of the threshold the outcome landed on. Seasons 1–3 used Forecast Futures exclusively. Binary Prediction Markets were introduced in Season 4."
STAGE 2
The DCC
One clearing contract per product. Click a slot to see what actually lives there.
↑ Both arrows land in the VENUE CONNECTIONS zone — the bottom slot in the DCC box above. Any venue submits intents there; nothing else in the DCC changes based on which one.
No public post from Autonity's own account showed a raw product spec — but real AutEx screenshots settle the question directly, and they're more concrete than a JSON schema alone. Separately, the afp-sdk GitHub repo confirms the underlying shape: every product is a JSON document with five top-level sections; the on-chain part is a PredictionProductV1 object registered in the Product Registry contract, while the rest — the "extended metadata" — is pinned to IPFS.
# afp-sdk — the shape of a real product specification
spec_dict = {
"product": {...}, # on-chain: PredictionProductV1 — id, symbol, collateral asset
"outcome_space": {...}, # what the contract pays out on
"outcome_point": {...}, # the specific settlement target
"oracle_config": {...}, # which oracle feed resolves it
"oracle_fallback": {...}, # what happens if the primary oracle fails
}
# registering a new product requires a builder stake:
product.register(pinned_specification, initial_builder_stake=Decimal("10"))
That initial_builder_stake argument is easy to miss but real: creating a new product on AFP isn't free — a product builder has to post collateral of their own to register it. Source: github.com/autonity/afp-sdk, README.
REAL SEASON 4 PRODUCT LIST — AutEx "BROWSE PRODUCTS"
Ticker
State
Description
CPIG26
LIVE
US Consumer Price Index | Value 01/26 | February 2026 Release
GDPG26
LIVE
US GDP Q4 2025 (Advance Estimate)
UERH26
LIVE
US Unemployment Rate | Value 02/26 | March 2026 Release
NFPH26
LIVE
US Total Nonfarm Employment | Value 02/26 | March 2026 Release
CLAIMS07W26
LIVE
US Initial Claims Week 7 2026
GSATG26
LIVE
Global surface air temperature anomaly — January 2026
EQCT06W26
LIVE
Global Earthquake Count for Week Ending 3rd February 2026
Ethereum BASEFEE contract-month avg (Gwei) — Feb 2026
CMCFGI04G26
PENDING
Coin Market Cap Fear and Greed Index — Feb 4 2026
COE1G26
PENDING
Singapore Cat A Certificate of Entitlement — Feb 2026 Bidding 1
WOMHUSA26 *
LIVE
United States wins Milano Cortina 2026 Men's Ice Hockey gold
SBPATRIOTS26 *
LIVE
New England Patriots win Super Bowl LX (2025 NFL season)
A partial list — the full Season 4 catalog ran well past these fourteen. * marks a Binary Prediction Market rather than a continuous Forecast Future. Note the range: macro data sits next to weather, crypto microstructure, precious metals, a foreign government auction price, and sports outcomes — all the same DCC machinery underneath.
This is the actual rendered shape of a product's "extended metadata" — matches the JSON sections above closely enough to identify which is which: Description/Frequency/Units read as outcome_space, and Source/Data Source read as oracle_config (a live FRED API endpoint, not a placeholder). Four other real products share this exact card layout and the same builder address — BTCVOL49W25/BTCVOL52W25 (Deribit DVOL), CPIX25 (BLS via FRED), and GDPF26 — suggesting AutEx itself registered the reference product set, builder stake and all.
STAGE 3
Two-Key Architecture
>> KEY_MODEL.DAT — margin and authentication are two separate keys. They can be the same key. They do not have to be.
MARGIN ACCOUNT KEY
Holds USDZ and ATN for gas
Deposited directly to the DCC
Venue-agnostic: same key works on any AFP venue
INTENT-SIGNING KEY
Authenticates orders to a specific venue (e.g. AutEx)
Venue-specific: AutEx verifies this key
Does NOT hold capital
The two can be the same key. They do not have to be. This is why "enter on AutEx, exit on Venue B" was possible without moving or re-custodying your collateral. The DCC tracks the margin account, not the venue's signing key.
Same position, same margin account, two different venue signing keys — nothing about the collateral moves between "open" and "close."
# afp-sdk README — margin API
margin_account.deposit(USDZ, Decimal("100.00")) # margin key controls this
margin_account.capital(USDZ) → 100.00 # readable independently of any venue
In practice: visit forecastathon.ai/margin-account, connect the same wallet used to register, and sign a gasless message proving ownership — no transaction, no gas. Then deposit USDZ into the on-chain margin account (a small ATN fee applies for this one on-chain step). From there, unrealized gains in one market can be used as margin in another — the cross-venue, cross-margining behaviour this stage is describing.
STAGE 4
Season 1 Stress Test (Historical)
AutEx went down mid-season. Step through what happened to the clearing layer underneath it.
STEP 1 / 4 — NORMAL OPERATION
Orders flow AutEx → DCC. Both systems green.
"The brief service outages of AutEx then gave the builders of the AFP clearing system a chance to verify that margin and settlement operations continued seamlessly on-chain. The robustness of the system was amply shown by the correctness of the on-chain state regardless of AutEx's double processing of trades during a period of operational disruption."
— Autonity Medium, "Forecastathon Season 1: Lessons Learnt," October 24, 2025
Consequence: rate limits imposed on AutEx post-Season 1 due to market-maker surge. Base fee cut 90%: 10 gwei → 1 gwei. Full writeup: Page 6 — Forecastathon, Season 1.
STAGE 5
Contract Types Across Seasons
What was tradeable, when, and where.
Season
Dates
Products
Collateral
Venue
S1
Sept 19 – Oct 20, 2025
US CPI Futures, Jobless Claims Futures
USDZ
AutEx only
S2
Oct 28 – Nov 27, 2025
+ US Quarterly GDP Futures, US Monthly Unemployment Rate Futures
USDZ
AutEx
S3
Dec 5, 2025 – Jan 6, 2026
+ Bitcoin Volatility (most active product of the series)
Full Season 1–4 timeline, standings, and community narrative: see Page 6 — Forecastathon.
● TOOL AVAILABLE — AINUMBERS.CO
The computation on this page has a working implementation in the Autonity Tool Suite on AINumbers.co. Each tool produces a fingerprint of its result — if the calculation changes, the fingerprint changes. Share it with anyone. They can verify it in seconds, in their own browser, with no server access.