Up or Down markets, explained by people who trade them

A window is a short binary market sourced from Polymarket. When it opens it records a price to beat. When it closes, the asset either finished above that price (Up) or below it (Down), and every share on the winning side pays out one dollar while the losing side pays nothing. Share prices in between move with the crowd, so a share that costs 62 cents is the market saying Up at 62 percent.

• Assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP and Dogecoin
• Durations: 5 minutes and 15 minutes, a new window as soon as the last one closes
• Payout: winning shares settle at $1.00, losing shares at $0.00
• Nothing to manage after the close, the window settles itself

This is the part most people get wrong and it costs money. Windows do not settle against the spot price you see on an exchange ticker. They settle against a Chainlink TWAP stream: a 30-second lookback for 5-minute windows and a 60-second lookback for 15-minute windows. The TWAP can sit dollars away from spot in a fast market, which is why a window can close "above" on your exchange app and still resolve Down. The price shown in the Hypertradeworx cockpit reads the settlement stream, so the number you watch is the number that settles you.

• 5-minute windows: Chainlink TWAP with a 30-second lookback
• 15-minute windows: Chainlink TWAP with a 60-second lookback
• An exact tie resolves Up

The cockpit has one panel with four modes. Two are built for the person who wants to call a direction and move on; two expose the underlying order book for the person who wants to work a price.

• Basic: pick Up or Down, type an amount in dollars, one tap. The simplest way to take a view on the window.
• Martingale: a fixed-base ladder that doubles after a loss and resets after a win. Base of $1, $2, $5 or $10, capped at six doublings, so the largest stake the mode will ever place is 64 times the base. Each duration keeps its own progression.
• Market: buy or sell Up or Down shares at the current book price, including selling a position you already hold before the window closes.
• Limit: rest a good-till-cancelled bid or ask at your own price and cancel it from the open-orders list if it does not fill.

Doubling after a loss recovers the previous losses plus one base unit when a win finally comes, and it fails when the losing streak outruns your balance. That is why the mode is capped rather than open-ended, and why the base cannot be changed mid-progression: mixing bases inside one streak breaks the arithmetic the mode depends on. Treat it as a sizing tool with a known worst case, not a way to make a coin flip pay. Practice mode is the right place to see the ladder run.

Open a market signed out and press Practice. The app mints a $1,000 paper balance on the spot, with no sign-up, no wallet and no deposit, and every practice trade runs against the live settlement feed on the real order flow. If you later sign in, the practice balance and its history come with you. Practice trades are kept apart from live trades and never touch anyone's money.

• $1,000 paper balance, minted on the first tap
• Live prices and the real settlement stream, not a simulator
• Balance survives sign-in, so nothing you learned is thrown away
• The same cockpit trades live once you deposit USDC

Live positions are funded in USDC and held in your own self-custodial wallet; Hypertradeworx supplies the interface and the routing and never takes custody. Markets are sourced from Polymarket, so the liquidity and the settlement rules are Polymarket's. You do not need a Polymarket account. Up or Down is also in the Android app, with the same assets, durations and order modes.

The cockpit shows the price to beat, the live settlement price, the distance between them, the time left, and the current Up and Down share prices. Under the chart sit the order flow for the current window, the trades tape, and the outcomes of recent windows. None of that predicts the next close. What it does is make the decision legible: how far price has to travel, how much time it has, and what the crowd is paying for each side right now.