When the price feed goes dark: the fairest thing a desk can do is nothing

The scenario nobody writes rules for

A dice game generates its own randomness, so it cannot lose it. A price-settled game does not: it depends on a number arriving from outside, continuously, and outside things fail. A relay drops. A network partitions. A provider has a bad afternoon.

The interesting question is not whether it happens — it will — but what a venue does in the minutes after. This is the moment where the gap between “provably fair” as a marketing phrase and as an engineering commitment becomes visible, because there is no seed to reveal and no hash to check. There is only a policy, written in advance or improvised under pressure.

Most venues do not publish one. We think that is the tell.

Why we do not simply let you close

The instinctive answer is player-friendly: if the feed dies, let people out at the last price we had. It sounds generous. It is actually the single most exploitable thing a desk could do.

Our feed going dark does not make the market stop. Bitcoin keeps trading on every exchange on earth, and a player with a second screen can see exactly where it went while our last known price sits frozen. Given the option to close at that stale number, nobody closes the losers. Everyone closes the winners, at a price that is no longer true, and the house absorbs the entire difference.

That asymmetry has a name — adverse selection — and it is precisely why regulated exchanges halt during a data failure rather than keep filling. A venue that keeps trading on a price it cannot verify is not being generous; it is being harvested, and the cost eventually reaches the players who were not watching.

What actually happens, in order

The rule has three stages, and the first one is the one that runs almost every time.

1. A tick older than a few seconds is not a price. Fills, liquidations, take-profits and stops all require a fresh one, so a brief stall simply pauses everything and resolves itself when the feed catches up.
2. A longer stall pauses the funding clock too. Time spent dark is credited back, so nobody pays financing for minutes the desk could not price.
3. Ten minutes dark on a market, and every open position on it is closed at zero — stake returned in full, no profit, no loss, no fee.

The pause being symmetric is the part that matters most. It would be trivially easy to write a desk that stops letting players out while still allowing the sweep to liquidate them — and it would look almost identical from outside. It does not, and that is checkable in the same code path: both read the price through the same freshness gate.

Why the decision is made on a clock

Returning stakes is not the most generous option available. A player who was up 300% at the moment the feed died loses that gain, and will not enjoy it. We think it is still the right rule, for a reason that is easier to see from the other side.

A time-based void is direction-blind. It does not know or care who was ahead, so it cannot be gamed by either party and it cannot be accused of favouring the house. Any price-based resolution, however carefully chosen, necessarily picks a winner using information that is no longer trustworthy.

It also terminates, which sounds obvious until you notice what the alternative is. Without a terminating rule, a feed that never comes back leaves positions open forever: you cannot close them, the sweep cannot resolve them, and the money sits frozen indefinitely. Freezing is a fine response for ten minutes and an intolerable one for ten days.

A void has no profit and no loss, which is exactly why it can be applied without knowing who was winning.

Saying so, before and afterwards

A rule that only appears after it fires is not a rule, it is an excuse. So the ten-minute policy is printed in the ticket next to the fees, on the section page, and in the game guide — before anything happens.

And when it does fire, the position does not simply vanish from your history. It is recorded as voided rather than closed, with the window our feed was unavailable, so the entry reads “stake returned · price feed down 14:32–14:47” rather than leaving you to guess.

One deliberate detail in that wording: it says our feed, never “the market was halted”. The market was open the whole time. We could not see it. Those are different statements and only one of them is true.