Wallet and trading guide

1. Set up a Solana wallet

A wallet is where your USDC and your outcome tokens live, and the thing that signs a trade. Phantom and Solflare both offer browser extensions and phone apps:

• Phantom: phantom.app.
• Solflare: solflare.com.

Either one works. When it offers to create a new wallet, it will show you a recovery phrase: a list of twelve or twenty-four words. Write it on paper and keep it offline. Anyone who has those words has the wallet. Do not photograph them, do not type them into a chat, and do not paste them into any site, including this one. This site never asks for them.

That address string is your public address. It is safe to share: it is how you receive money. The recovery phrase is the secret, and it is the only thing that matters if you lose access to the device.

2. Fund it: SOL for fees, USDC to trade

• SOL pays network fees. You need SOL to submit transactions on Solana, even when you are buying with USDC. Fees vary; check the amount your wallet shows.
• USDC is the money you trade. It buys YES or NO, and it is what a winning token pays out. It is a US dollar stablecoin on Solana.

Buy through an exchange or a purchase service in your wallet, if available where you live. Check its fees and withdrawal rules. When withdrawing, select the Solana network and confirm the receiving address. Send a small test amount first, and keep enough SOL for fees.

3. Find the pool and swap

Trading happens on a Solana exchange, in a pool of two tokens. Each market has two separate pools: YES/USDC and NO/USDC. Each pool's price moves on its own buying and selling. Because YES and NO are complements (a pair is created and undone for 1 USDC), arbitrage pulls their combined price toward 1 USDC, but the pools can still drift apart.

Buying YES pushes the YES price up, because you are taking YES out of its pool. Buying NO pushes the NO price up, the same way. So a trader buys the side they expect to win: YES if the hypothesis looks likely to hold, NO if it does not.

Check the pool's swap fee and the price impact for your order before confirming. Mint and redemption fees are separate, and each market prints its own. A displayed spot price excludes those costs. See configured fees and how the platform makes money.

Before sizing an order, check the pool's depth and recent trades: YES volume & liquidity ↗ · NO volume & liquidity ↗

There is also a manual route if a link is not on the page. Open a Solana exchange such as jup.ag or raydium.io, choose Swap, and paste in the market's YES or NO token mint address as the token you want to buy. The market page is where the mint addresses are published.

The same eligibility rules apply on the manual route. Trading through any interface is subject to the terms. This site's country block does not make trading from a restricted location allowed, and using a VPN to get around it breaks the terms.

How the swap works, in the wallet

1. Connect your wallet on the exchange and pick the side you want to buy.
2. Type the amount of USDC you want to spend. The exchange shows the tokens you would get and a price impact.
3. Confirm in your wallet. You approve the exact amount, and the wallet asks you to sign.
4. Check that the transaction succeeded and the tokens arrived in your wallet. Confirmation times vary.

Every swap is a transaction you approve by hand, in your wallet, for an amount you can see first. Nothing moves without your signature.

4. Read the odds

A YES price of 0.60 means 0.60 USDC, or 60¢, per YES token before swap fees and price impact. The pool's price comes from the buying and selling in it. It may reflect what traders expect, but it is not a guaranteed probability and it is not the weekly AI estimate.

What that costs you, and what it pays:

• A YES token at 0.60 costs about 0.60 USDC.
• If the market resolves YES, that token redeems for 1 USDC before the redemption fee. Your gross gain is about 0.40 USDC, less all applicable fees.
• If the market resolves NO, that YES token pays 0. You lose the 0.60 USDC purchase price and the fees you paid.

Check the NO pool's price before buying YES. Because one YES plus one NO is backed by 1 USDC, traders can create and undo pairs to pull the two prices back toward $1. Fees, thin liquidity and access rules can still leave a gap. Each chart shows one pool's price on its own.

Creating a complete YES + NO pair locks 1 USDC in the market's reserve, with the mint fee paid separately. Handing back one of each before resolution returns 1 USDC less the redemption fee. After final resolution, the winner redeems for 1 USDC gross less the redemption fee.

5. Settlement and redemption

A market ends one way: three models read the evidence, all three return the same explicit YES or NO against the rule frozen on the market page, and that result is written to Solana. The outcome is final and there is no appeal. A weekly AI estimate on its own never settles a market. There is no scheduled expiry.

Settlement records the winning side. It does not send you money. Nobody can move funds out of your wallet for you, so collecting is one transaction you sign yourself.

How you collect after settlement

1. Check the market is actually final. Open the market's Resolution status page. It shows a final YES or NO, the Solana transaction signature and the finalized slot. If it still says open, nothing is redeemable yet.
2. Find which token you hold. Only the winning side pays. One winning token redeems for 1 USDC gross. The losing side pays zero, which is the ordinary outcome and not a failure of the site.
3. Burn the winning token for USDC. Redemption is a burn: the token goes back to the market program, and the program releases 1 USDC from the market's reserve per token, less the redemption fee printed on the market page. Your wallet shows the fee and the net amount before you sign.
4. Confirm it landed. Check the transaction succeeded and the USDC balance in your wallet went up by the net amount. If the transaction fails, your token is still in your wallet and nothing is lost. You can try again.

Redemption is per token, so a large holding may take more than one transaction. Solana network fees still apply and are paid in SOL. Nothing here is automatic or timed, and it does not depend on us being around to press a button.

If you would rather not wait for settlement, you can sell the token in its pool while trading is open. Liquidity, swap fees and price impact set what you get, and a buyer at your price is not guaranteed. Selling and redeeming can produce different net amounts; your wallet shows each one before you sign.

To see where a market stands, open its Resolution status page. That page shows the current state, any recorded outcome, the transaction, and links to the evidence behind it. Settlement records a contractual outcome, not proof that the scientific hypothesis is true.

6. What can go wrong

• You control the keys, and only you can recover them. If you lose your recovery phrase and your device, the wallet and everything in it are gone. Nobody at Science Markets can restore them.
• Eligibility rules apply to you. Trading is not available from the United States, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and other restricted countries, and the terms set the age and access rules too. Trading from a restricted location can get your access cut off.
• A wrong-side token is worth 0 at settlement. If the hypothesis settles against your side, that token pays nothing. This is the ordinary case, not a failure.
• The pool price moves against you. Someone else's trade, or a new round of evidence, can move the price before you sell. You can be right about the science and still lose money on the timing.
• Network fees are small but real. Every Solana transaction costs a fee, and every swap pays the pool's swap fee. Mint and redemption fees apply to their respective actions, not automatically to every swap. Check each fee before confirming.
• Check the deployment before you send funds. Confirm the market's program, token addresses and pools on the market page. A website link does not establish any of those things.

The risk disclosure and the terms list the rest.