PrometheX Academy · AMM Prediction Markets

Run a prediction market that actually makes money.

把预测市场做成真正赚钱的生意。

A practical operator's field guide to AMM prediction markets: what to list, how to seed, when to pull liquidity, and the one place an AMM is a genuine profit center. Read the playbook — then model your own market.

6
Lessons & tools
~25min
Total read time

Start here

The complete operator playbook

All lessons

Chapters & interactive tools
Interactive
Tool Live model

The APMM Calculator

Model operator P&L for any market: seed, window, terminal price, turnover and fee. See fees, convergence loss, net result and breakeven turnover update live.

Interactive5 min
01
Launch 90 days · $100k

Catalog & Launch

Count is sports, money is politics. A barbell catalog of ~120 markets, demand mechanics that manufacture the round trip, and hard kill criteria at days 30 / 60 / 90.

Chapter 14 min
02
Market-making Capital

Capital & Market-Making

Routing by contestedness, seeding to expected volume, withdrawal that stops future loss, and the single most-resourced function: opening price.

Chapter 25 min
03
Risk Advanced

Risk Rules

Six rules ranked by what actually kills operators — adverse selection, correlation, resolution, bankroll, ops and abuse. Diversification counts clusters, not markets.

Chapter 35 min
04
Business KPIs

The Business Model

Revenue lines ranked, the KPIs that gate every listing, and the three year-one calls: book-first, fee structure, and which categories to actually back.

Chapter 44 min
Strategy Start here

The Operator's Doctrine

The one-paragraph thesis the whole playbook hangs on: who you actually earn from, who you must refuse, and where the only real AMM profit center lives.

Overview2 min
Strategy Core · 18 min read

The Operator's Doctrine

运营总纲

Where an AMM makes money, where it loses it, and the operating rules that keep you on the right side.

The fee monetizes retail round-trip flow and nothing else — informed flow is fee-immune by construction and causes all the inventory loss. So: order book first for the head markets (flow capture, zero inventory risk), the AMM as the cold-start machine for the long tail (seed = paid marketing with a measurable cost), and a true AMM profit center in exactly one niche: high-churn contested sports and news.

"List what noise traders love, refuse what insiders love, cap every correlated cluster, keep half the bankroll out of the pools."

01Catalog & Launch

Count is sports, money is politics, P&L is decided by ~10 head events. The catalog is a barbell of roughly 120 markets — a thin head that carries the P&L, and a long tail that exists to fill the board and cold-start liquidity.

TierMarketsWhatSeed eachFee
A — heads8–10Marquee sports, 2 contested politics (p̄ 0.55–0.8), 1–2 crypto monthlies$2.5–4k150–200 bps
B — mid30–40Next-tier fixtures, secondary news$500–800200 bps
C — tail70–80Board filler (median sports event ≈ $7.4k lifetime volume)$0–150 or book-only300 bps

Demand mechanics — manufacture the round trip. Live-sports cadence, a prominent cash-out button (turns one-way bets into fee-bearing round trips), weekly P&L-percentage leaderboards, sign-up credit withdrawable only after 5× wagering, and community market requests gated on pre-committed demand.

Kill criteria

Day 30 — Tier A sports ≥ 8× turnover per weekly cycle; tail markets < 1× over two cycles get delisted. Day 60 — delist any category whose flow is > 70% one-directional. Day 90 — sports must be profitable in both outcomes at 150–200 bps, otherwise the audience isn't there and more capital only scales the loss.

02Capital & Market-Making

"Opening price is the most-resourced function. A 0.30 open resolving toward 0.85 burns 53.5% of seed."
  • Routing. AMM only for contested retail markets (p̄ ≤ 0.8) and the long tail; book-only for anything decisive (p̄ ≥ 0.9) or insider-prone; both on heads — a thin AMM for always-on UX with a quoting bot inside its spread.
  • Seeding. Seed ≈ 0.5–1× expected daily volume, floor 10–20× typical trade size. Add only after ≥ 1×/day turnover for 3 days, never past 1× daily volume.
  • Withdrawal pays only to stop future convergence (the accrued loss is sunk). Automate a pull trigger at forecast-vs-price gap > 15 points: on a $10k pool at 0.70 with news pointing to 0.95, pulling saves ~$4,800 of future loss against ~$45 of forgone fees.
  • Opening price. Anchor to de-vigged external odds (auto-block if |p₀ − reference| > 5 pts); no anchor → 24–48h book-only price discovery; always a 10–20% probe tranche first; news scan within 15 minutes of seeding.
  • Dead time. Hurdle math uses duration + oracle window (2–5 d ≈ 30% ROI haircut on a 7-day market). Stagger seeding so redemptions land daily; keep a 15–20% liquid buffer.

03Risk Rules

Ranked by what actually kills operators, not by how often the textbook mentions them.

  1. Adverse selection. Listing screen: outcome generated by a process, not a < 20-person decision; no one plausibly knows > 24h early; a public updating signal exists; p̄ ≤ 0.9 at 2%; projected turnover ≥ 2× breakeven. Any "no" → book-only or reject. Personnel decisions, single-company announcements, niche esports: zero AMM seed, ever.
  2. Correlation. Same league + week / same election / same asset = one cluster. Max 10% of bankroll per cluster, 25% per category; diversification counts clusters, not markets.
  3. Resolution. Mandatory wording template (source + timestamp + tiebreak + postponement); oracle bond + gas < 5% of seed; dispute reserve = 2× bonds outstanding; propose resolution ourselves at T+0.
  4. Bankroll. Max 50% deployed; per-market cap 2% of bankroll; sized to survive three consecutive zero-upset months (≈ −22%).
  5. Ops. Fee asserted ∈ {100, 200, 300} bps at deploy; read back on-chain config before announcing; never hike fees mid-life (53:1 self-harm ratio).
  6. Abuse. Rewards ≤ 50% of net fees paid per address per epoch; exclude incentive volume from the turnover stats used for seeding — wash flow looks exactly like profitable noise.

04The Business Model

"Points and token value aren't revenue — they're deferred dilution buying turnover."

Revenue lines, ranked. ① Book taker fees (50–100 bps, zero inventory risk — the scalable line) ② AMM LP margin (real only in the contested high-churn band) ③ withdrawal skim ④ B2B sublicensing once the book prints ⑤ sponsorships ⑥ points / token value — not revenue.

KPIs. List only at projected turnover ≥ 1.5× breakeven; fee capture ≥ 0.6·f·T̂; annualized ROI ≥ 30% incl. settlement gap; seed / daily-volume ≤ 1×; category loss ratio < 0.6.

Year-one calls. Order-book-first with the AMM as feeder; 2% AMM flat at creation / sub-1% book taker; sports for count + politics for money, skip crypto price targets (breakeven mean, undiversifiable variance).

Tool Interactive · 5 min

The APMM Calculator

APMM 计算器

Pick a scenario, then move the sliders. Everything from the playbook — fees, convergence loss, breakeven turnover — recalculates live.

Annualized ROI on locked capital

Parameters

Advanced

Results

Net profit / loss
Fees earned
Loss at settlement
Breakeven daily turnover

Cumulative P&L over the trading window

Cumulative fees Accrued convergence loss Net P&L

Net P&L vs terminal price

Net P&L at resolution Fee revenue Resolution loss
Reference

Glossary

术语表

Every term the playbook and calculator lean on, in one place.

A

AMM (Automated Market Maker)

A pricing contract that quotes both sides of a market from a liquidity pool, so trades execute instantly against the pool instead of waiting for a counterparty.

Adverse selection

Trading against counterparties who know more than the pool. In insider-prone markets, informed flow steadily extracts pool value.

Annualized ROI

Net profit scaled to a yearly rate on locked capital, including the oracle settlement window.

B

Bankroll

The operator's total capital across all markets. At most 50% is ever deployed into pools at once.

Barbell catalog

A few heavily-seeded head markets plus a long tail of cheap board filler — and very little in between.

Basis points (bps)

One hundredth of a percent — the unit fees are quoted in. 100 bps = 1%.

Breakeven turnover

The daily noise volume, as a share of pool size, at which fees exactly cover convergence loss plus ops cost.

C

Cash-out

Closing a position before resolution. Turns one-way bets into fee-paying round trips — a core demand mechanic.

Cluster (correlation)

Markets whose outcomes hang on the same underlying event — same league week, same election, same asset. Capped at 10% of bankroll each.

Convergence loss

The pool's loss as price moves from the opening price toward the true outcome — paid out to informed traders along the way.

D

Dead time

The days between market close and oracle payout, when capital is locked but earning nothing. 2–5 days cuts a 7-day market's ROI by ~30%.

De-vigged odds

External bookmaker odds with the margin stripped out — the reference anchor for every opening price.

F

Fee capture

Realized fees as a share of the theoretical fee × turnover. Listing KPI: at least 0.6.

Fee switch

A scheduled change to the trading fee partway through a market's life. Buy-side fees convert at (1 − price), so a late hike mostly lands on sellers.

H

Head market

The 8–10 markets that decide the whole P&L — marquee sports, contested politics, crypto monthlies.

Hurdle rate

The minimum acceptable APR on locked capital. A market can be profitable and still fail the hurdle.

I

Informed flow

Trades made on real information. Fee-immune by construction, and the source of all inventory loss.

K

Kill criteria

Pre-committed delisting rules checked at days 30, 60 and 90 — turnover floors and one-directional-flow caps.

L

Long tail

The 70–80 filler markets that exist to fill the board. Median lifetime volume of a tail sports event: about $7.4k.

N

Noise flow

Retail round-trip trading driven by entertainment rather than information — the only flow the fee actually monetizes.

O

Opening price (p₀)

The probability the pool quotes at seeding. The most-resourced function in the operation: a 0.30 open resolving toward 0.85 burns 53.5% of seed.

Oracle

The mechanism that reports the real-world outcome on-chain and triggers settlement.

Order book

A matching engine where traders quote each other directly. Zero inventory risk for the operator — the scalable revenue line.

P

Probe tranche

The first 10–20% of seed deployed to test a new market before committing full size.

R

Resolution

The final determination of the outcome and redemption of winning shares. Wording templates and dispute reserves live here.

Round trip

A buy plus a later sell — pays the fee twice. The unit of monetizable volume.

S

Seed liquidity

Capital deposited to open the pool, sized at 0.5–1× expected daily volume — accounted for as paid marketing with a measurable cost.

T

Terminal price (p̄)

Where the price ends up just before resolution — how certain the outcome becomes. The single biggest driver of convergence loss.

Turnover

Daily volume divided by pool size. The variable that decides whether fees beat losses.

W

Wash trading

Self-dealing volume farmed for incentives. Statistically identical to profitable noise — which is why incentive volume never counts toward seeding stats.

Withdrawal trigger

An automated liquidity pull when the forecast-vs-price gap exceeds 15 points. It only stops future convergence — the accrued loss is sunk.