The Settlement Registry

The census Nobody had read the fine print at scale. Nearly every contract on Polymarket carries a written resolution rule naming what settles it, and on 23 July 2026 we read the whole catalogue in one pass: 584,210 markets, every rule parsed by the same deterministic script. 582,754 of them, 99.75%, carry rule text. 1,456 carry none. What the rules say is not what a reader would guess. 60.31% of listed markets settle on the official result of a scheduled contest: a tennis match, a World Cup game, a Counter-Strike map. A further 30.41% settle on a price feed, either an on-chain oracle or a trading venue’s own candle. Together that is 90.72% of everything Polymarket has ever listed. Add the 5.55% that settle on a named published statistical series, four fifths of it, 25,734 markets, daily high and low temperature at named airport weather stations, and 96.27% of the catalogue is decided by a machine reading a number off a scoreboard, a feed or a dataset. Machines settle the catalogue. Human judgement is a rounding error. The Settlement Registry · Vera Research The markets a machine cannot settle That leaves a sliver. Human judgement, a rule that names no source but rests on a consensu...