Touch Markets
What is a touch market?
A touch market lets you trade whether a price is touched. You pick a target price and a time window. Touch pays if the price reaches your target at any point before the window closes. No Touch pays if it never does.
Prices are quoted in cents per $1 of payout, so the price is the probability. A contract at 35¢ is the pool saying "about a 35% chance" — pay $35, win $100 if it touches. A contract at 5¢ is a 20x return on a target the market thinks is a long shot.
The contract
Every position is four things, frozen at the moment you buy:
Asset — SOL or BTC today.
Target price — any price you type, or a preset off the chart. It doesn't move after you buy.
Window — 5 minutes, 1 hour, or 24 hours.
Payout — the fixed dollar amount you receive if you win.
Example: SOL is at $76. You buy Touch $78, 1 hour, $100 payout at 22¢. You pay $22. If SOL trades $78 at any point in the next hour, $100 credits to your balance — the instant it happens, not at expiry. If it never gets there, the contract expires worthless and you're out the $22.
The mirror trade is No Touch: same target, same window, priced at roughly $1 minus the Touch price. You're betting the market stays away.
Windows and expiry
Windows run on a shared grid so everyone buying in the same period gets the exact same start and end. Your buy snaps down to the current grid boundary:
5 minutes
every 5 min
Buy at 14:07 → window 14:05 → 14:10
1 hour
every hour
Buy at 14:07 → window 14:00 → 15:00
24 hours
every hour
Buy at 14:07 → window 14:00 today → 14:00 tomorrow
If you buy in the final 75 seconds of a window, you roll forward into the next one instead of getting a stub contract. That next window hasn't started yet, so nothing that happened before it counts toward your trade.
What counts as a touch
"Did it touch?" is settled by evidence, never by discretion. Prices arrive from Pyth Lazer as signed, timestamped messages — anyone can verify them, forever — and the on-chain rule is deliberately strict:
Two design choices are doing the work there:
Three consecutive frames, not one. A single glitched print can't settle a whole ladder of targets, and a real move has no trouble producing three.
The book side, not the mid. An upside touch needs the bid through your target — meaning you could genuinely have sold there. A one-tick wick that never posted a real bid doesn't count.
The same rule runs in all three places it matters: live detection while your position is open, the quote check that refuses already-swept targets, and the retroactive proof at settlement. When a window closes there's a short on-chain finalization period during which anyone holding contrary signed evidence can still correct the record — after which the result is final and permanent.
Selling back before expiry
You don't have to hold to settlement. The pool will buy your position back at its live quote:
Hit Sell back to pool and the refund credits to your balance immediately; the contract is cancelled. Because the bid re-quotes continuously, you set a minimum refund when you confirm — if the price moves before the fill lands, the order is refused rather than filled below it.
Sell-back needs a live, healthy market. If volatility data is stale or the market is paused, sell-back is temporarily unavailable — but the position still settles automatically, so nothing is stuck.
Fees
There is no separate open or close fee on a touch trade. The cost is the spread inside the quoted price — Touch and No Touch on the same level sum to slightly more than $1, and that excess is the house edge. Typical two-way overround runs around 8–10%, wider on the 5-minute market and during volatile stretches.
Imperial takes 25% of that edge as protocol revenue, and only on edge the book has actually banked. The remainder accrues to the liquidity pool that underwrites the contracts.
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