How APEX works.
APEX is a skill-based sequence competition on Canton Network, designed as a Quantitative Prediction Market. Players purchase tickets with Canton Coin (CC) and commit a secret 7-digit sequence per ticket. Ticket purchases accumulate to generate the prize pool. The sequence that sits furthest from every other ticket takes the pot.
Tickets are bearer instruments and are controlled by a cryptographic key held only on the owner's device. This is one of the first browser-based bearer-key signing designs on Canton Network. By design, a ticket's numbers must not be visible to anyone other than the provable (key) owner. The commit-reveal scheme ensures that this is the case and that the APEX platform has no access to the data.
By providing a verified email, players' devices generate a signing key that is perpetually linked to their APEX account. Players fund their account with CC for ticket purchases. The winning scores are computed by the APEX platform which determines the winning ticket(s) although the scoring can be verified by anyone on-chain. While a round runs, CC is held in a platform pool, but everything that moves value toward you is for players to authorise. Ticket reveal, prize claim, and fund withdrawal are activated with the device key. The APEX platform runs the machinery but cannot forge signatures or send a prize anywhere other than what was signed for. Funds can only be withdrawn to the original source.
- ›Deterministic skill over luck.
- ›Sealed commitments that keep every pick private until reveal.
- ›On-chain results anyone can audit.
- ›Prize delivery and withdrawal signed by a key only you hold.
- ›A bearer-ticket model built natively on Canton Network.
Crypto, not trust.
APEX runs the market, but the things that protect your money are enforced by cryptography and the Canton ledger, not by the platform's word. This is the exact line between what the platform can and cannot do.
Yours to hold. Yours to recover.
When you join, your device creates a signing key. That key is your account, there is no username or password, and it never leaves your device. It authorises everything that touches your money: buying tickets, revealing them, claiming a prize, and withdrawing funds. The platform never holds it and cannot sign for you.
The key is encrypted on your device with a passphrase you choose. There is no reset, so pick one you will remember. You are shown a 24-word recovery phrase once, the only backup of your key. Save it. With it you can restore your account, your balance, and your prizes on any device, even if you lose this one.
What the phrase does not restore
The recovery phrase brings back your 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, or they cannot be scored.
Pick the number furthest from everyone else.
Each player submits a 7-digit sequence, digits 0 through 9. Your goal is simple: pick the sequence that is as different as possible from every other player's sequence. The player who achieves the greatest total difference wins the prize pool.
Think about what others will pick, then go somewhere they won't.
Reveal or forfeit
Your reveal secret lives only on the device you bought from. The platform never receives it and cannot reveal on your behalf. If you clear your browser data, switch devices before revealing, or miss the reveal window, the ticket cannot be revealed anywhere and its stake is forfeit. Reveal promptly once the round closes.
Hamming distance.
The Hamming distance between two sequences is simply the number of positions where they differ. For 7-digit sequences the maximum possible distance between any two sequences is 7.
Each player's total isolation score is the sum of their Hamming distances against every other revealed sequence. The player with the highest total score wins. With N revealed sequences of length D=7, the maximum possible score for a player is 7×(N−1).
Scored on-chain, from a public histogram
APEX does not recompute every pair off-chain. As tickets reveal, it tallies how many players chose each digit in each position into a histogram that is published on-chain. Your score reads straight off it: start from the maximum and subtract, for each of your seven digits, how many players shared it. This is identical to summing your Hamming distance against every other ticket, but because the histogram is on the ledger, anyone can check any ticket's score in a single pass instead of re-deriving it from scratch. The interactive histogram on the home page demonstrates it.
score(i) = 7 × N − Σ H[k][seq_i[k]] for k in 0..6
≡ Σ hamming(seq_i, seq_j) for all j ≠ i
winner = argmax score(i)
Exponential pricing curve.
Ticket price rises exponentially as the round fills. The first ticket costs 50 CC. The last ticket (ticket #1,000,000) costs 5,000 CC. The curve is continuous, every ticket costs slightly more than the one before.
The prize pool is the sum of all ticket prices paid, less the 5% platform fee. At full capacity (1 million tickets) the prize pool reaches approximately 1.07 billion CC. Early entrants benefit disproportionately paying a fraction of the price while the pool grows around them.
price(n) = 50 × 100^(n / 1,000,000)
Network fee
Each purchase pays a Canton network traffic fee. It is charged per transaction, not per ticket, and is priced from current network and CC market rates, so it moves over time. The exact fee for your purchase is quoted before you confirm. Buying several tickets in one purchase costs the same network fee as buying one, so batch your tickets to keep fees low.
When scores are equal.
If two or more players achieve identical isolation scores, the prize is divided proportionally. Each tied player's share is weighted by the natural logarithm of their ticket number. A player who entered later (higher ticket number) paid more and receives a larger share.
Any number of players can tie. The tie-break is deterministic and computable by any party from the published on-chain data.
share(i) = prizePool × weight(i) / Σ weight(j)
Weekly rounds.
Rounds run on a fixed weekly cadence. A round opens every Monday at 12:00 UTC and closes every Thursday at 16:00 UTC. Tickets can be bought any time while the round is open. At close, no further purchases are accepted and the reveal window opens.
After the reveal window closes, every revealed ticket is scored and a provisional result is posted on-chain, which opens a challenge window. During that window, anyone who scored better than the posted winner can prove it on-chain (see below). Once the window closes with no successful challenge, the result finalizes as the LotteryResult contract, and winners claim from the Results page. If no tickets are revealed in a round, there is no winner and the pool goes to the platform treasury.
Provisional until challenged.
When scoring finishes, the winners are posted as provisional, not final, and a challenge window opens. Anyone holding a revealed ticket that scores better than the posted winner can file a challenge. The challenge is a permanent public record on Canton, a ChallengeProof, showing the posted result was beaten.
The platform then corrects the result, which reopens the window so the correction can itself be checked. If a result were finalized while a valid challenge stood uncorrected, that finalization would be a permanent public record of a wrong result. The winner is settled by open challenge, not by trusting the platform.
What is on-chain.
APEX is built on Canton Network using DAML smart contracts. The following are recorded on the Canton ledger and cannot be altered by anyone after creation.
Verifying the winner yourself
After the reveal window, every revealed ticket exists on-chain as a LotteryTicketRevealed contract, 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 ChallengeProof; the platform cannot finalize over a standing challenge without leaving that record public. The platform cannot alter a revealed ticket, the histogram, or the scoring.
Prize claim
After settlement the winner claims the prize from the Results page. The claim is signed on your device with your bearer key and delivered as a Canton token transfer to a wallet you choose, pre-filled with the wallet you deposited from. You may need to accept the incoming transfer in that wallet. The signature is verified on-chain, so the platform drives the transaction but cannot redirect or forge a claim. The transfer is recorded on the Canton ledger and can be verified against the LotteryResult contract.
Withdraw
Your CC balance can be sent to any Canton party at any time using the Withdraw button in the top banner. A network fee applies to the transfer and is shown before you confirm; a balance smaller than the fee cannot be withdrawn. Transfers settle directly on the Canton ledger, and the platform cannot block or reverse a withdrawal.
Platform
APEX is built and operated by Tokenisys. The platform fee is 5% of each round's prize pool, collected via treasury sweep. The on-chain LotteryResult records the exact split so any discrepancy between the declared result and actual payouts is publicly detectable.
Ready to play?