Every high-profile blow-up in this market, the $237M Zelenskyy "suit", the Venezuela election, the Strategy Bitcoin sale, traces back to one undefined word or one unnamed source. Not a smart-contract bug: a wording bug. Limitless settles price markets in milliseconds through Pyth and Chainlink, but its event and community markets still ride on prose a human wrote. That prose is the job. Below: the competitive map of how platforms resolve, the disputes that wording caused, and a house template plus a working linter to make those failures structurally impossible.
A prediction market is a promise to pay $1 on a defined outcome. The only thing standing between that promise and a dispute is the sentence that defines the outcome. Limitless has world-class settlement for price markets and a thin, manual, centralized layer for everything that needs human judgment, with no published criteria standard for the community markets anyone can now create. That is exactly where a Content Specialist earns their seat: a house template that names the source, pins the time, defines every judgment word, and handles the edge cases, applied as a review gate before a market ever opens. This page maps each JD duty to a plan, then shows the template, real rewrites, and a linter I built to enforce it.
Limitless (limitless.exchange) is the largest onchain prediction market on Base. Binary YES/NO shares trade between $0.01 and $0.99 on a central limit order book; each pair is fully collateralized by $1.00 USDC, winning shares redeem for $1.00 and losing shares expire worthless. Two families of markets sit on top: high-frequency price markets (BTC and ETH hourly and daily), which auto-resolve from Pyth and, more recently, Chainlink Data Streams at sub-second speed, and event markets (elections, court decisions, "will X do Y by Z") that need human judgment and are resolved manually by the Limitless team, typically 24 to 72 hours after the deadline. Anyone can now create a market too, flagged with a Community badge. The settlement engine is excellent. The words that define what settles are where the risk, and the opportunity, live.
A trader does not buy an opinion. They buy a claim on $1 that pays out if a defined thing happens. The definition is the entire contract. When it is loose, the payout becomes a judgment call, and a judgment call on other people's money becomes a dispute. The chain of custody looks like this:
"Will BTC be above $X at the top of the hour" points at a single machine-readable number from a named feed. Pyth or Chainlink reads it, the contract settles, no human is in the loop. The rule is short because the source is unambiguous. This is most of Limitless volume and it mostly takes care of itself.
"Will the incumbent win", "will they leave office", "will they wear a suit" have no feed. The rule has to manufacture the same unambiguity by hand: name the authority, define the terms, pin the moment, pre-answer the edge cases. That is a writing job, and it is the one that decides whether a market is quietly settled or ends up on Coindesk.
Two poles. Decentralized oracles (transparent but game-able) and regulated centralized settlement (accountable but discretionary). Limitless sits close to the regulated-centralized model for events while using fast oracles for price. In every model, the resolution text is the single point that decides whether a dispute can even arise.
| Platform | Who / what resolves | Strength | Gap in resolution clarity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Limitless the role | Pyth + Chainlink auto for price; Limitless team manual for events; refund on misresolution | Fast, deterministic price settlement; USDC-collateralized; sub-second feeds | Manual, centralized event resolution; no formal dispute layer; community-market criteria undefined |
| Polymarket largest | UMA optimistic oracle: permissionless propose and dispute, then a DVM token vote | Decentralized, auditable onchain; explicit per-market rules and named source | Token vote capturable by whales; repeated high-profile misresolutions; loose wording is the attack surface |
| Kalshi | CFTC-regulated exchange settles against the contract's named Source Agency and Expiration Value | Regulated, accountable, legal recourse; formal rulebook language | Single-org discretion; can freeze or withhold payouts; buried carveouts surprise traders |
| Myriad | AMM pricing plus oracles; adopted Chainlink for crypto; team-created markets only | Instant payouts on price markets; media-integrated distribution | No user-created markets yet; community-market resolution standard unshipped |
| Azuro | B2B layer; AzuroDAO decentralized oracle with token-staked arbitration; builder-defined rules | Flexible, builder-defined; decentralized dispute staking | Resolution quality delegated to third-party frontends; less standardized |
Polymarket's decentralization does not remove the wording problem, it exposes it, because a loose rule becomes a public vote. Kalshi's regulation does not remove it either, because discretion still needs a clean contract to apply. Limitless can win on the thing that is upstream of both: never letting an ambiguous market open in the first place. That is cheaper than any oracle and it is a content function.
Each of these moved millions and made headlines. None was a code failure. Every one was a word left undefined or a source left unnamed, and every one was preventable at the writing stage.
| Market | Volume | What broke, in the wording | The one-line fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polymarket: Zelenskyy "suit" | ~$237M | "Suit" was never defined. He wore a jacket and matching trousers to a NATO summit; outlets split; the tie-break rule was "consensus of credible reporting", itself subjective. Resolved YES, then NO. | Define "suit" (matching jacket and trousers, tie optional) and name the single outlet whose description governs. |
| Polymarket: Venezuela election | Multi-million | The rule did not pin one authority. The official body (CNE) declared Maduro; token-holders resolved for Gonzalez. "Who officially won" and "who actually won" are different questions and the market conflated them. | Name the single resolution authority in the rule, and state what happens if it is disputed. |
| Polymarket: Barron Trump / $DJT | >$1M | "Preponderance of evidence" that a private individual was "involved" in a token, with no official source and no named arbiter of what counts as evidence. Unresolvable by construction. | Do not open markets whose only source is "evidence". Require a nameable, checkable authority. |
| Polymarket: Strategy May BTC sale | >$60M | A regulatory filing showed a sale inside the window, yet the token vote resolved NO. Even a clean rule can be overridden by a capturable voting layer (most votes came from the ten largest wallets). | A content fix cannot fix an oracle, but a rule that cites the exact filing and figure makes the correct answer undeniable. |
| Kalshi: Iran Supreme Leader | >$54M | A "death carveout" existed but was buried; traders reading the title "leave office" did not see it. Lawsuits followed even though the clause was technically correct. | Surface any carveout that changes the headline answer in the market's context line, not just the fine print. |
Sources in §10. The pattern is consistent: undefined judgment word, unnamed or conflated source, or a buried carveout. All three are writing problems.
Limitless lets anyone create a market, flagged Community, and pays the creator a frozen share of trading fees for its lifetime. That is great for supply and terrible for resolution quality, because the docs do not yet specify who writes or enforces the resolution criteria for those markets. Every dispute in §04 came from a market a professional wrote. Community markets are written by whoever clicks create. Without a guardrail, they are the next dispute waiting to happen, and they carry the Limitless name.
Fixing house-written event markets improves dozens of markets a week. Fixing the community-creation flow improves the thousands that scale claims to make possible, and it is the difference between user-generated markets being a growth engine or a liability. It is also unambiguously a writing-and-standards job, not an engineering one. The engineering exists; the criteria layer does not.
The posting lists seven responsibilities. Each one, turned into a plan, with where it is detailed on this page.
| JD duty | My plan | Detailed in |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Author market descriptions and resolution criteria that eliminate ambiguity | Write to a fixed house template: one named source, exact time and timezone, defined judgment words, explicit edge cases. Every market clears the 8-point rubric before it opens. | §06, §07 |
| 2 · Define YES/NO outcomes, data sources, edge cases, force majeure | Make each of these a required field, not an afterthought. Name a primary source and a fallback, and pre-answer ties, postponement, non-occurrence, and cancellation in the rule itself. | §06, §07 |
| 3 · Research events and validate resolution sources | Before writing, confirm the source actually publishes the number, on a known schedule, in a checkable place. If it does not, the market does not open, or it opens with a different, sourceable question. | §08 |
| 4 · Partner with Product and Operations on market launches | Sit in the launch path as a review gate: a fast, lightweight sign-off that a market is resolvable, so Ops never has to adjudicate a rule I could have fixed in one line. | §08, §09 |
| 5 · Respond rapidly to real-world changes affecting markets | Own a watchlist of live event markets and the sources they depend on. When reality shifts (a postponement, a source outage), post a clarification that preserves intent without moving goalposts. | §08 |
| 6 · Uphold quality across high-volume market pipelines | Scale review with tooling, not headcount: the linter as a pre-publish check, copyable rule patterns per category, and a guided form for community creators. | ★, §08 |
| 7 · Refine internal documentation and market-writing guidelines | Own the style guide as a living document. Every dispute or near-miss becomes a new rule or example, so the guidelines get sharper with each market shipped. | §08, §09 |
One fixed shape for every event market, so nothing gets left out. It is the checklist the linter enforces, drawn from Polymarket's own resolution docs, the Kalshi rulebook, and the failures in §04.
One primary source, specific enough to check.
Date, clock time, timezone. "By year end" fails.
Both branches stated; inclusive vs exclusive explicit.
Postponed, cancelled, non-occurrence handled.
"Significant", "soon", "well" replaced with numbers.
Explicit number, operator, units, currency.
A named backup if the primary fails.
Inclusive endpoints, which session, exact instant.
The role is writing. So here is writing. Three markets, one per category Limitless runs, each shown as a loose draft and my rewrite. The rewrites are what I would ship.
"Well", "strongly", "significant", "a lot", "around" are five separate arguments. No source, no number, no timezone.
No source. Silent on extra time, penalties, postponement, or an annulled result. "After the match" is not a time.
The exact Venezuela failure: no named authority, so "who wins" becomes a vote about the truth instead of a lookup.
The auditor ships with these exact examples loaded, and it also points the same rubric at Limitless's own live markets: it pulls the active book from the Limitless API and scores every market in real time, so you can see which live markets lean on "consensus of credible reporting" and where the resolution gaps are. Same tool a creator or reviewer would use before hitting publish.
Quality does not scale by writing every market myself. It scales by putting a lightweight, tooled checkpoint in front of every launch and making the good pattern the easy one.
One shape for every event market (§06). Start with the categories Limitless runs most, crypto and macro price events, then sports, then politics, the hardest.
A pre-publish check that scores a draft and blocks critical gaps, so Ops never adjudicates a rule I could have fixed in one line. The working version is live now (§07).
Highest leverage (★). Turn the template into required fields plus copyable patterns, so a creator cannot ship a sourceless "will it moon" market.
Pre-approved skeletons for "price above X", "candidate certified", "match winner", "metric released by agency". Writers fill blanks instead of starting from prose.
Track open event markets and the sources they depend on. When reality shifts, post a clarification that preserves intent without moving goalposts (JD duty 5).
Confirm the source publishes the number, on a schedule, in a checkable place. No source, no market, or reframe to a sourceable question (JD duty 3).
Each near-miss becomes a new line in the guide and a new check in the linter. The standard compounds; the same mistake does not happen twice.
The Kalshi Iran lesson. Any exception that changes the headline answer goes in the market's context line, where a trader reads it before betting.
Facts are drawn from public sources as of mid-2026: the Limitless docs and app, coverage of its funding and oracle integrations, the resolution documentation of Polymarket and the Kalshi rulebook, and reporting on the named disputes. Dollar figures for disputes are the volumes reported at the time. The template and rubric synthesize those public resolution guides with the failure patterns in §04. The auditor is my own work, built for this application; the scoring runs in your browser, and a small Cloudflare Worker proxies the public Limitless API so the page can read the live market book (it is not Limitless code). This is unsolicited interview homework; happy to walk through any section.
Limitless resolution docs: docs.limitless.exchange, market resolution
Limitless + Chainlink: cryptobriefing.com
Zelenskyy "suit": coindesk.com
Venezuela election: frankmuci.substack.com
Barron / $DJT: theblock.co
Strategy BTC sale: thedefiant.io
Kalshi Iran dispute: finance.yahoo.com
Kalshi rulebook: cftc.gov, Kalshi rulebook
Polymarket resolution: docs.polymarket.com
Live linter (my work sample): limitless-linter.leverlabs.workers.dev
Independent resolution playbook for the Limitless Content Specialist role · 2026 · edwardtay.com