Wallet and trading guide

1. Install a Solana wallet

A wallet is where your USDC and your outcome tokens live, and the thing that signs a trade. Phantom and Solflare offer browser extensions and phone apps:

• Phantom: phantom.app.
• Solflare: solflare.com.

Pick one and install it. When it offers to create a new wallet, it will show you a recovery phrase: a list of twelve or twenty-four words. Write it on paper and keep it offline. Anyone who has those words has the wallet. Do not photograph them, do not type them into a chat, and do not paste them into any site, including this one. This site never asks for them.

That address string is your public address. It is safe to share: it is how you receive money. The recovery phrase is the secret, and it is the only thing that matters if you lose access to the device.

2. Fund it: SOL for fees, USDC to trade

• SOL pays network fees. You need SOL to submit transactions on Solana, even when you are buying with USDC. Fees vary; check the amount your wallet shows.
• USDC, the money you trade. This is what buys YES or NO, and it is what a winning token pays out. It is a US dollar stablecoin on Solana.

Buy through an exchange or a purchase service in your wallet, if available where you live. Check its fees and withdrawal rules. When withdrawing, select the Solana network and confirm the receiving address. Send a small test amount first, and keep enough SOL for fees.

3. Open the market on Raydium

Trading happens on Raydium, a Solana exchange, in a pool of two tokens. Each market has two separate pools: YES/USDC and NO/USDC. Each pool's price moves on its own buying and selling. Because YES and NO are complements (a pair mints and redeems for 1 USDC), arbitrage pushes their combined price toward 1 USDC, but the pools can still drift apart.

Buying YES pushes the YES price up, because you are taking YES out of its pool. Buying NO pushes the NO price up, the same way. So you buy the side you think will win: if you think the claim will hold up, buy YES; if you think it will not, buy NO.

Check the pool's swap fee and the price impact for your order before confirming. Mint and redemption fees are separate, disclosed by the market. A displayed spot price excludes those costs; no fee tier or trading venue is assumed here. See configured fees and how the platform makes money.

There is also a manual route if a link is not on the page. Open raydium.io, choose Swap, and paste in the market's YES or NO token mint address as the token you want to buy. The market page is where a real mint address would be published; this prototype has no chain, so no mint exists to paste yet.

The same eligibility rules apply on the manual route. Trading through any interface is subject to the terms; a country block on this site's own pages does not make trading from a restricted location allowed.

How the swap works, in the wallet

1. Connect your wallet on Raydium and pick the side you want to buy.
2. Type the amount of USDC you want to spend. Raydium shows the tokens you would get and a price impact.
3. Confirm in your wallet. You approve the exact amount, and the wallet asks you to sign.
4. Check that the transaction succeeded and the tokens arrived in your wallet. Confirmation times vary.

Nothing about this spends on its own. Every swap is a transaction you approve by hand, in your wallet, for an amount you can see first.

4. Read the odds

A YES price of 0.60 means 0.60 USDC, or 60¢, per YES token before swap fees and price impact. That is the price the market set: buying and selling pressure in the pool. It may express traders' view of the outcome, but it is not a guaranteed probability or the weekly AI estimate.

What that costs you, and what it pays:

• A YES token at 0.60 costs about 0.60 USDC.
• If the market resolves YES, that token redeems for 1 USDC before the redemption fee. Your gross gain is about 0.40 USDC, less all applicable fees.
• If the market resolves NO, that YES token pays 0. You lose the 0.60 USDC purchase price and the fees you paid.

Read the NO pool’s price before buying. Minting and merging pairs lets traders arbitrage the combined executable YES + NO price toward 1 USDC. Fees, liquidity and trading restrictions can leave a gap. Charts show each pool’s recorded price separately.

Minting a complete YES + NO pair locks 1 USDC in collateral, with any disclosed mint fee paid separately. Merging a complete pair follows the market's rules and applicable fees. After final resolution, the winner redeems for 1 USDC gross less the redemption fee.

5. Settlement and redemption

Each market's resolution page sets out its process. Some use proposals and a challenge window; terminal markets require matching explicit YES/NO verdicts and a finalized Solana transaction, with no appeal or reopening. A weekly AI estimate alone does not settle a market or pay tokens. There is no scheduled expiry.

How you get your money: when a market settles, the winning token becomes redeemable for 1 USDC each, less the disclosed redemption fee. Redemption requires a separate transaction from your wallet; this guide cannot submit it. Settlement does not send money automatically. You may also be able to sell through the pool if there is enough liquidity. Compare the amount you would receive after fees.

To see where a market stands, open its Resolution status page. That page shows the current state, the process that applies, any recorded outcome, and links to the evidence behind it. Settlement records a contractual outcome, not proof that the scientific claim is true.

6. What can go wrong

• You control the keys, and only you can recover them. If you lose your recovery phrase and your device, the wallet and everything in it are gone. Nobody at Science Markets can restore them.
• Eligibility rules apply to you. Trading is not available from the United States, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and other restricted countries, and the terms set the age and access rules too. Trading from a restricted location can get your access cut off, and the risk of getting it wrong is yours, not ours.
• A wrong-side token is worth 0 at settlement. If the claim settles against your side, that token pays nothing. This is the ordinary case, not a failure.
• The pool price moves against you. Someone else's trade, or a new round of evidence, can move the price before you sell. You can be right about the science and still lose money on the timing.
• Network fees are small but real. Every Solana transaction costs a fee, and every Raydium swap pays the pool's swap fee. Mint and redemption fees apply to their respective actions, not automatically to every swap. Check each fee before confirming.
• Deployment and access must be verified. Do not send funds until the market's program, token addresses, pools and eligibility are confirmed. A website link does not establish any of those things.

The risk disclosure and the terms list the rest.