Onix — AMM-Priced Parimutuel Prediction Markets
Continuous AMM price discovery on top of parimutuel settlement — the price moves like an AMM, while liquidity carries the risk profile of a tote: the market maker can never be bankrupted.
Onix & Forecaster
Onix is the on-chain protocol. Forecaster is the thin client to it on VIZ Ledger — the headless, platform-independent access layer that lets people anywhere in the world participate in the on-chain prediction market by signing pm_* operations directly against public VIZ nodes. See the section overview & map for the full documentation tree.
The one idea
Onix decouples price from payout:
- Price (discovery) — a CPMM curve (binary) or LMSR-softmax (multi) updates a live probability on every bet and assigns each bet a weight (its claim ticket).
- Payout (settlement) — winners are paid only from the losers' forfeited stakes, split by weight: pure parimutuel, strictly zero-sum (the protocol never mints a token).
Everything distinctive about Onix follows from this split.
Why it matters — three things
1 · Liquidity that cannot be drained
Because winners are paid from losers and never from LP principal, the liquidity provider cannot be bankrupted — no impermanent loss, no inventory risk, no death-by-sniper. Guaranteed by construction (AM–GM for CPMM, conservation for LMSR), not by insurance.
2 · Passive yield without IL — the Lazy Pool
One deposit auto-spreads as silent liquidity across many markets and funds opt-in leverage, with MasterChef-style reward accounting. Earn prediction-market liquidity yield without picking markets or bearing impermanent loss.
3 · Native to the chain, zero-sum
Markets are first-class consensus operations (pm_*), not smart contracts: censorship-resistant, composable, ~3-second blocks, no oracle bridge. The protocol never emits tokens — it only redistributes.
How a bet works
- You bet
Xon an outcome.Xenters the curve; the curve returns your weight — more weight if you bet earlier, before the price moves. - The board updates. The live coefficient for a side is
1 + opposing_pool × (1 − commission) / own_pool, with the commission (oracle + creator + LP) already baked in. - At resolution, the losers' stakes (minus commission) are split among the winners by weight. Your payout = your stake back + your share of the losing pool. LP principal is returned untouched.
How it compares
| CLOB / AMM (Polymarket, Kalshi) | Plain parimutuel (tote) | Onix | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live price | yes | no (pool ratio only) | yes (CPMM / LMSR) |
| Odds locked at bet time | yes | no | no (honest parimutuel) |
| LP / maker can be bankrupted | yes (IL, snipers, gap risk) | n/a | no (structural) |
| Yield-bearing liquidity layer | fragile | none | Lazy Pool, no IL |
| Lives in | contracts / backend | backend | consensus (pm_*) |
| Token emission | sometimes | no | no (zero-sum) |
The honest tradeoff
Odds are parimutuel — they drift until close
Onix does not lock your coefficient at bet time. The board moves as money flows, and the final coefficient is known only at close — exactly like a tote. This is not a flaw to patch: the only way to lock odds is to have a counterparty bear the risk (a bookmaker, or an AMM LP that can lose). Onix's drift is the direct price of its LP guarantee — risk lives between bettors, so no one's liquidity can burn.
What's novel
- AMM weighting + parimutuel settlement in one integrated engine — continuous price discovery without maker inventory risk.
- Structural, provable LP safety instead of insured or subsidized liquidity.
- A mutualized, yield-bearing liquidity layer (the Lazy Pool) that also funds opt-in leverage — liquidations run against pre-bet reserves so the pool is always made whole.
- Opt-in anti-MEV (batch / commit-reveal betting) and transparent governance (bonded oracles, public-hearing disputes with revisable votes) — all layered on the safe base without ever touching the LP guarantee.
Learn more
- Protocol operations — Prediction Markets
- Plugin API — Prediction Market API