# APEX A Quantitative Prediction Market on the Canton Network, built and operated by Tokenisys. ## What APEX is APEX is a weekly competition in which players commit a secret seven-digit sequence. After the round closes and every player reveals their pick, the sequence that sits furthest from all the others wins the prize pool. It is skill over luck: the aim is to anticipate where the crowd will cluster and place your pick as far from them as possible. Ticket purchases fund the pool. The winner takes 95 percent and the platform takes 5 percent. Every ticket, every score, and every payout is recorded on the Canton Network, and any participant can verify the winner independently. ## What makes it notable - Self-custodial. Every action that moves a player's money is signed by a cryptographic key held only on that player's own device. The platform runs the machinery but holds no key and cannot forge a signature, alter a result, or redirect a prize. - Private until reveal. A ticket records only a hash of the chosen sequence while the round is open. No one, including the platform, can see any pick until the player reveals it after the round closes. - Independently verifiable. As tickets reveal, the digit counts are tallied into a scoring histogram published on-chain. Anyone can read it, check any ticket's score in a single pass, and challenge a wrong winner, without trusting the platform. - Browser-native bearer keys. APEX is one of the first designs to run browser-based bearer-key signing on the Canton Network, with no wallet extension required. ## How to play 1. Join with a verified email. Your device creates a signing key, and that key is your account. You set a passphrase that encrypts it on your device, and you are shown a 24-word recovery phrase once. 2. Fund your account with Canton Coin (CC). 3. Buy tickets while the round is open. Each ticket commits a hash of your seven-digit pick; the plaintext never leaves your device. 4. Reveal your tickets in the reveal window after the round closes. Revealing publishes your sequence and proves it matches the commitment you made when you bought. 5. Scores are computed over the revealed tickets from an on-chain histogram, and a provisional result is posted, which opens a challenge window. Once the window closes with no successful challenge, the result is final. 6. If you win, claim the prize from the Results page. It is delivered as a Canton token transfer to a wallet you choose. A ticket that is not revealed within the reveal window is not scored and cannot win, and its stake is not refunded. ## Scoring Each revealed ticket is scored by its total Hamming distance from every other revealed ticket. Hamming distance counts how many of the seven positions differ between two sequences. Summed across all opponents, this is an isolation score: the higher the score, the further the ticket sits from the crowd. The highest score wins. For a field of random picks, the expected Hamming distance between any two seven-digit sequences is 6.3 positions. As tickets reveal, APEX tallies how many players chose each digit in each position into a histogram that is published on-chain. A ticket's score reads directly off it: from the maximum, subtract how many players shared each of your seven digits. This is identical to summing the Hamming distance against every other ticket, but because the histogram is on the ledger, anyone can verify any ticket's score in a single pass rather than recomputing every pair. ## Economics - Sequence space: seven digits, each 0 to 9, giving 10,000,000 possible sequences. - Pricing: an exponential curve. The first ticket costs 50 CC and the price rises as the round fills, up to 5,000 CC at capacity. A per-transaction network fee also applies and is quoted before purchase. - Capacity: up to 1,000,000 tickets per round. - Prize split: 95 percent to the winner, 5 percent to the platform, recorded exactly on-chain. - Tie-break: tied tickets share the pool, weighted so that later entries receive a larger portion. ## Rounds Rounds run on a fixed weekly cadence. A round opens Monday at 12:00 UTC and closes Thursday at 16:00 UTC. The reveal window runs Thursday 16:00 to 17:00 UTC. Each round publishes its exact open, close, and reveal-window times on-chain, and those are the authoritative times. After the reveal window closes, scores are computed and a provisional result is posted on-chain, which opens a challenge window. Anyone holding a revealed ticket that scored better than the posted winner can challenge it on-chain during that window; the platform then corrects the result, and finalizing over an unresolved challenge would itself be a permanent public record of a wrong result. Once the window closes cleanly, the result finalizes and winners claim. If no tickets are revealed in a round, there is no winner and the pool goes to the platform treasury. ## Your key and your recovery The signing key created on your device is the heart of the model. It is your identity, and it authorises every action that touches your money: buying tickets, revealing them, claiming prizes, and withdrawing funds. The platform never receives it. - The key is encrypted at rest on your device with a passphrase you choose. There is no reset, so the passphrase is chosen to be memorable. - You are shown a 24-word recovery phrase once. It is the only backup of the key. With it you can restore your account, your balance, and your prize claims on any device, even if you lose the original one. - One limit is worth understanding clearly: the recovery phrase restores the key, but not the secret picks of tickets you have not yet revealed. Those live only on the device you bought them on. Reveal your tickets from that device within the reveal window. Funds can only be withdrawn to the wallet they were deposited from, and a prize can only be sent to where the winner signs for it. Both are enforced cryptographically and on-chain, not by platform policy. ## Verifiability After the reveal window, every revealed ticket exists on-chain as a public contract carrying its sequence, its opening nonce, and its ticket number, and the round's scoring histogram is published on the result itself. Any party can read the histogram, check any ticket's score against it in a single pass, and confirm the posted winner. If the posted winner is wrong, a holder of a better-scoring ticket challenges it on-chain, creating a permanent public record, and the platform cannot finalize over a standing challenge without leaving that record. The platform cannot alter a revealed ticket, the histogram, or the scoring. A complete machine-readable specification of the rules is available in the Agent view of the Rules page at https://apex.hypercubic.space. The current spec version is apex-v9. ## Trust boundaries APEX runs the market, but the protections on a player's money are enforced by cryptography and the Canton ledger, not by the platform's word. The platform cannot see a pick before it is revealed, since only a hash is on-chain while the round runs. It cannot sign for a player, since every move of a player's money is signed by a key held only on that player's device. It cannot alter a ticket or a score, since revealed tickets and the scoring histogram are public on-chain records. It cannot post a wrong winner unchallenged, since anyone who scored better proves it on-chain and a wrong result becomes a permanent public record. And it cannot redirect a prize or move a player's funds, since transfers go only where the player signed and withdrawals only to the deposit wallet. What the platform can do is narrow: run the market and its schedule, hold the pool while a round is running, drive the transactions on-chain, and compute the provisional result that anyone can then check and challenge. ## Platform and network APEX is built and operated by Tokenisys (https://tokenisys.com) on the Canton Network, settling on the Global Synchronizer. The currency is Canton Coin (CC). The platform fee is 5 percent of each round's prize pool.