An institution that runs no market

The Reference is a permanent public record kept by an institution that operates no prediction market and holds no position in any outcome it records. Its role is the one played in other domains by independent reference-data bodies: to say, canonically and verifiably, what a traded instrument refers to — without being a party to it.

Explicit boundaries

• not a prediction market or exchange;
• not a forecaster or oracle;
• not an analytics product or dashboard;
• not a source of opinion about outcomes.

The permanent record

• canonical event identity;
• bindings from many venues to one canonical proposition;
• measured divergence between bound markets;
• sealed, permanent reference editions.

How the record is kept

These principles are demonstrable from the published tree, not asserted about it:

• Immutability. A published edition is never modified. Corrections are additive editions or explicit errata, never silent edits.
• Determinism. Identical inputs produce byte-identical outputs.
• Fail closed. Publishing incomplete or misleading information is worse than publishing nothing.
• Honest incompleteness. Unknown domains remain explicitly pending; the system never fabricates certainty.
• Identity before settlement. Canonical identity does not imply adjudication; reference may exist without settlement.
• Provenance on every assertion. Evidence, lineage, and verification are first-class, not afterthoughts.

The errata record

Corrections are recorded openly. See the errata record for this Edition, and Verify to confirm any published value yourself.