Market Making
Market makers provide liquidity by responding to auction requests. When someone creates a prediction, you compete with other responders to offer them the best odds—if your bid wins and the prediction fails, you collect the total amount wagered. Since predictions can contain multiple picks, you only need one of the requester's picks to be wrong to win.
The Trading Terminal is a real-time interface for market making. It streams live auctions and lets you respond in three ways: manual bidding, automated limit orders, and copy trading.
Manual Bidding
Click any auction row in the terminal to expand it and place a bid directly.
- Review the prediction — See exactly which picks the requester is wagering on and their wager amount.
- Set your bid amount — This is your wager (the responder's stake). Combined with the requester's wager, it determines the implied odds.
- Set an expiration — Bids are cryptographically signed with an expiration timestamp. If the requester doesn't accept before it expires, your bid is void.
- Submit — Your signature is sent to the relayer and shown to the requester. If they accept, the trade settles onchain.
Quick-increment buttons (+0.01, +1, +10, +100) let you rapidly outbid competitors. The terminal auto-updates your bid when a higher competing bid arrives.
Understanding odds
When you bid, the terminal shows your implied probability:
| Your Bid | Requester Wager | Total Wager | Your Implied Probability |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 USDe | 90 USDe | 100 USDe | 10% (you believe 90%+ the prediction fails) |
| 50 USDe | 50 USDe | 100 USDe | 50% (even odds) |
| 90 USDe | 10 USDe | 100 USDe | 90% (you believe 10%+ the prediction fails) |
Higher bids mean you're offering better odds to the requester—you're betting that their prediction is less likely to succeed.
Limit Orders
Create standing orders that automatically bid on matching auctions. This is useful when you want to provide liquidity at specific odds without watching the terminal.
- Click "Create Order" in the terminal's Auto-Bid panel.
- Select conditions — Choose one or more questions to target. Your order will match auctions that contain these conditions.
- Set your odds threshold — Define the minimum implied probability you're willing to accept. The system calculates your bid amount to hit exactly these odds.
- Set an expiration — Orders auto-pause after the specified duration.
When an auction appears that matches your criteria, the terminal automatically signs and submits a bid at your target odds.
Copy Trading
Automatically outbid a specific wallet address whenever they bid on an auction.
- Click "Create Order" and select "Copy Trade" strategy.
- Enter the wallet address — The account you want to copy.
- Set an increment — The amount (in USDe) to add on top of their bid.
- Set an expiration — Copy trades auto-pause after the specified duration.
When the target wallet submits a bid, your order immediately counters with their bid amount plus your increment.
Enable Sessions
Limit orders and copy trades require signing each bid. To avoid constant wallet popups, enable sessions in your settings. Sessions let the app sign bids on your behalf for a limited time without prompting you each time.
With sessions enabled, your orders can respond instantly to incoming auctions—critical for competitive bidding where speed matters.
Building a Bot
For more sophisticated strategies—custom filtering, dynamic sizing, portfolio management—you can build a programmatic market maker that connects directly to the auction relayer.
See the Market Making Agent guide for a minimal starter that:
- Connects to the relayer WebSocket
- Listens for auction requests
- Signs EIP-712 bids with your private key
- Submits bids programmatically
The relayer API is open source and documented. Any strategy you can express in code can participate in Sapience auctions.