Security, Economic Integrity, and Abuse Prevention
How Foremarket remains robust when anyone can create markets.
Permissionless market creation introduces power, but it also introduces attack surface. Foremarket is designed with the assumption that malicious markets, adversarial traders, and incentive exploits will exist. The protocol’s job is not to prevent this behavior socially, but to make it economically unprofitable and mechanically contained.
The first line of defense is creator bonding. Every market requires a creator bond that remains locked until final settlement:
Creator bonds convert market quality into a capital decision. Low-effort or adversarial markets become expensive to create at scale. High-quality markets amortize the bond through creator fees and reputation.
The second layer is explicit resolution paths. Markets must declare how truth is determined at creation time. There is no discretionary “admin resolve” function. Resolution authority is encoded:
ResolutionAuthority =
Oracle | Creator | Hybrid
This prevents retroactive rule changes and constrains abuse to predefined mechanisms.
Dispute resolution is likewise economic, not procedural. Challengers must post dispute bonds to contest outcomes:
DisputeBond > 0
If dispute fails → bond slashed
If dispute succeeds → challenger rewarded
This deters griefing and ensures disputes surface only when expected value is positive.
On the trading side, Foremarket enforces position limits and liquidity-aware pricing. Thin markets cannot be dominated cheaply. Large trades incur slippage proportional to conviction:
This makes manipulation costly and self-revealing.
Sybil resistance is handled indirectly. Rather than attempting identity verification, Foremarket prices influence. Multiple wallets do not confer advantage without capital. Market power is proportional to economic exposure, not account count.
Finally, settlement finality is absolute. Once a market is settled, state cannot be reverted. This prevents governance capture or post-hoc intervention.
Foremarket’s security model accepts that permissionless systems cannot eliminate bad actors. Instead, it ensures that the cheapest strategy is honesty, and that abuse degrades only the attacker’s capital, not the platform’s integrity.