VolRoc Reference — Methodology

Edition: reference-v1.2026.07 Methodology version: v1 Edition vintage (as_of T): 2026-07-08T23:00:00Z

This document is the methodology edition pinned by methodology_reference in the Reference Edition Manifest. It is covered by the Manifest hash. It creates no authority independent of the Manifest: where this prose and the Manifest disagree, the Manifest governs.

1. Scope

Reference Edition 2026.07 is a contemporaneous, registry-hashed adjudication of the identity and settlement criteria of one prediction-market proposition family — the FIFA World Cup 2026 top-scorer / Golden Boot family — across two venues, Kalshi and Polymarket, captured before any market resolved.

The Edition records, for that family:

• canonical market identity and the entities they reference;
• the two canonical propositions and their cross-venue bindings;
• the point-in-time settlement criteria in force at capture;
• the measured divergences between the venues;
• the coverage and the known gaps, stated explicitly.

It is deliberately small and fully measured. One completely adjudicated family demonstrates the constitution; a broad, partly assumed Edition would violate it.

The Edition asserts no outcomes. Every market was active and pre-resolution at capture. The Edition records the criteria in force, not how any market settled.

2. Constitutional basis

The Edition is assembled under the ratified VolRoc Reference constitution:

• R1 — Reference Edition Constitution (deliverables D1–D11).
• G45 / G46 — strategy and product definition ("give away the present, sell the past"; the moat is contemporaneous, versioned adjudication of identity, not tape).
• M2 — canonical cross-venue bindings; B4 — settlement vocabulary.
• Manifest rulings A1, A2, A4, A8 (ratified 2026-07-10): every Manifest field is either deterministically derived from a sealed artifact or a declared input the hash then covers; the assembler reads no clock, scans no directory, touches no network; the criteria snapshot is pinned by content_hash with its absent B2 version chain declared, never faked; the canonical encoding is declared inline.

3. What the Edition pins

The Manifest references four sealed substrate objects by content hash. Each was sealed independently, before this Edition existed, and each reproduces its stored identity through a single shared verification gate:

The binding ledger carries the two canonical propositions and 52 cross-venue leg bindings — Kalshi KXWCGOALLEADER (24 player markets) and Polymarket (28 nation markets). It pins the other three objects as substrate references; the ledger pins itself into the Manifest as a declared self-reference, because an object cannot contain its own hash. The Manifest's identity closes the provenance boundary the substrate leaves open: the four pinned hashes form a bijection with the four reproduced sealed identities, matched by digest, never by name.

4. The two measured divergences

Both are recorded below the fact/interpretation boundary and are never blended into a single cross-venue claim.

• Referent divergence (structural). Kalshi KXWCGOALLEADER settles on the individual player; Polymarket settles on the nation. These are categorically different propositions — classified RELATED, never EQUIVALENCE. A Kalshi "YES" on a player and a Polymarket "YES" on that player's nation are not the same claim and can resolve oppositely without contradiction.
• Tiebreaker divergence (TIE_RULE). Both venues defer to FIFA, then specify different fallback chains: Kalshi — most assists, then fewest minutes played; Polymarket — fewer penalty-kick goals, then alphabetical last name.

The FIFA-authority ambiguity (both cite "FIFA rules" while specifying different tiebreakers) is recorded as observed and not adjudicated by this Edition.

5. Reproducibility

The Edition is content-addressed and deterministic. Identical inputs produce byte-identical Manifest bytes and an identical Manifest hash.

• Canonical encoding (volroc-canonical-encoding-v1, declared inline in the Manifest): JSON, UTF-8, keys sorted by codepoint recursively, ","/":" separators, ensure_ascii=false, floats prohibited, digest sha256 in sha256:<64 hex> form.
• Projection code version: reference_edition_manifest_v1.
• Assembly is a pure function of the four sealed artifacts plus the declared Edition inputs. No clock read, no directory scan, no network access.
• Two independent implementations produce the same Manifest bytes and hash; a validator re-derives coverage from the sealed bytes, verifies the four sealed identities through the single gate, confirms the substrate bijection, checks leg-count integrity (24==24, 28==28), and confirms every measured gap is declared.

Replay from the package alone. A third party with only this Edition package — the Manifest, this methodology, the errata, the shipped substrate objects, and the declared inputs — recomputes every derived field, the Manifest hash, and each shipped file's digest, and obtains a byte-identical result. No access to VolRoc systems is required. If replay diverges, the Edition has failed and is not issued.

6. Limitations

• Single capture hour. Criteria are captured at one hour (Kalshi 03:00Z, Polymarket 03:15Z on 2026-07-08). Venues may amend market descriptions; the Edition asserts the criteria as captured at that hour, not for all time.
• Cross-venue capture skew. The two venues were captured 15 minutes apart; each venue's native snapshot_at_utc is preserved verbatim and never blended. No single capture instant is asserted.
• Criteria text only. The Edition compares stated settlement criteria. It ships no prices, liquidity, probabilities, analytics, or forecasts.
• Family scope. Limited to the World Cup 2026 top-scorer family. Other World Cup markets are out of scope.
• Pre-resolution. All markets active/open. No settlement is asserted.
• Criteria version chain absent. The criteria snapshot is a sealed single-hour capture, not a B2 version chain; the absent chain is declared, not fabricated.
• Outcome space not exhaustive. Neither proposition's bound legs are asserted to exhaust its outcome space.
• FIFA-authority ambiguity recorded, not adjudicated.
• Polymarket price-capture window. A documented 19-day Polymarket price-capture degradation (2026-06-18 ~02:00Z through 2026-07-07) exists in the underlying bronze price record. It does not affect the settlement criteria captured 2026-07-08 (which post-date recovery), and this Edition ships no prices. See erratum E1-ERR-002.

7. Errata

This Edition carries two dated corrections of prior session records that its measured substrate supersedes (see errata_ledger in the Manifest and ERRATA.md):

• E1-ERR-001 (TIE_RULE): correction of the tiebreaker mechanism attribution.
• E1-ERR-002 (CAPTURE_STATE): retirement of the Polymarket degraded-window assumption by measurement.

The Manifest's errata_ledger is authoritative; ERRATA.md is a human-readable projection of it.

8. Citation

Cite this Edition by its content-addressed identity, which resolves permanently and verifies independently of VolRoc's servers.

• Minimum: VolRoc Reference v1, edition 2026.07 (sha256:<Manifest hash>), published on the Edition's publication_timestamp.
• Full: additionally names the pinned entities_v1, resolution_vocabulary_v1, and proposition_bindings_v1 hashes above, the criteria-snapshot hash, and this methodology edition (v1).

The exact Manifest hash and publication date are recorded in the Manifest and in CITATION.cff, shipped with this package.

*VolRoc Reference — contemporaneous, registry-hashed adjudication of prediction-market identity and resolution criteria before hindsight exists. The archival substrate, not any presentation of it, is the permanent record.*