Getting Started#

A hands-on lesson: connect your wallet, place your first trade, and collect your first payout.

Before you trade real money, read Risks. It is short, honest, and explains what can go wrong — including the one mistake that costs beginners real money: forgetting to claim after a market resolves.

Seesaw is a permissionless binary prediction-market protocol on Solana. For a full product overview see the docs landing page; for how the mechanics work under the hood see How It Works.

Prerequisites#

You'll need:

• A compatible Solana wallet
• SOL for transaction fees and any accounts your transaction creates
• The settlement token accepted by the selected deployment

Follow Funding your wallet to verify the network and mint, choose a funding route, and distinguish wallet funds from market free funds. There is no fixed SOL amount that covers every account-creation path.

Step 1: Connect Your Wallet#

1. Navigate to seesaw.markets
2. Click Connect Wallet in the top right
3. Select your wallet from the list
4. Approve the connection request in your wallet

Your wallet address will appear in the navbar when connected. Connecting never moves funds — money only leaves your wallet when you place an order and approve that transaction.

Step 2: Browse Markets#

The main view shows a list of active markets. Each entry shows the asset (e.g. SOL/USD), the time remaining in the window, and the current YES/NO prices. The Order Book panel shows resting bids and asks; the Order Form is where you place trades; Positions (Portfolio tab) tracks your open P&L.

Read the board columns as follows:

On smaller screens these labels appear within each card. Paused blocks new placement; PostOnly prevents taking liquidity; ForceCancelOnly blocks new orders and enables authority/guardian cancellation of individual resting orders. These controls do not choose the outcome. See Risks.

The market-detail freshness indicator combines the last observed microstructure update timestamp with WebSocket connectivity and polling failures. It is not the age or validity of the Pyth oracle print. The order ticket's separate stale book note uses bookAsOfSlot and indexer progress/lag. Missing freshness data is not proof that a quote is current; the ticket rereads state before signing.

When choosing a market, compare:

• Time remaining — a market about to close leaves little room for your order to fill.
• Order book depth — more resting orders mean better prices and easier fills.
• The asset you know — trade the chart you actually follow.

Step 3: Choose a Side#

Native Pyth markets are price-direction windows with a configurable duration, from 60 seconds to 7 days. Every market asks the same question — will the asset close higher or lower than it started? — across supported Pyth price feeds, with SOL/USD, BTC/USD, and ETH/USD among the configured feeds. For imported event questions, read External markets: their resolution source and settlement timing differ from native price windows.

Pick your side:

• YES — you think the asset will be higher (or exactly flat) at the end of the window.
• NO — you think it will be lower.

You should see the order book's current best bid and ask prices. A YES share at 0.60 means the market currently prices "up" at about 60%.

Step 4: Place Your First Trade#

1. Select the YES or NO tab
2. Enter quantity (number of shares)
3. Set your limit price (between 0.01 and 0.99 USDT per share)
4. Click Buy YES (or Buy NO)
5. Approve the transaction in your wallet

Your cost is price × quantity: buying 100 YES at 0.60 locks 60 USDT (plus a small taker fee if your order matches immediately). If your price doesn't match anyone right away, the order rests on the book until someone matches it, you cancel it, or trading ends.

Note: resting orders must sit reasonably close to the current market price (within a protocol-enforced price band). If your price is too far from the action the order is rejected before it ever rests — see Why was my order rejected? for the details.

The share price is both the probability and your cost. Buying 100 YES at 0.60 means you are paying 60 USDT for 100 shares that pay 100 USDT if YES wins — a 40 USDT profit. A deeper table of price/probability/profit values is in Understanding Shares.

Tip: use a limit order and set a price you're comfortable with. IOC orders can also be used to "buy at market" with an on-chain worst-price protection bound.

Step 5: Wait for Resolution#

After the market's duration window closes:

1. The end price is captured from Pyth (anyone can trigger this — it's permissionless)
2. The market resolves: UP if end ≥ start, DOWN otherwise (an exactly unchanged price resolves UP)
3. Winning shares become redeemable for 1 USDT each

If Pyth can't supply a usable price even after a generous waiting period (7 days past the market's end, by default), the market expires instead of resolving, and both YES and NO shares redeem at 0.50 USDT — nobody's funds are stranded by an oracle outage.

Step 6: Claim Winnings#

1. Go to Portfolio
2. Find the resolved market
3. Click Claim next to winning positions
4. Approve the transaction
5. USDT is transferred to your wallet

Claiming also returns any collateral still locked in your unfilled buy orders from that market.

⚠️ Don't forget to claim#

Winnings are not pushed to your wallet automatically — you redeem them. Starting 7 days after a market resolves, the market becomes eligible for permissionless teardown: cleanup transactions settle leftover positions (paying owners what they are owed where possible) and then erase the market, sweeping anything still abandoned — including forfeited leftovers from abandoned resting orders — to the market creator.

The safe habit: claim every resolved market within a few days. Details and the exact timeline are in Risks and Claiming Winnings.

Next Steps#

• Before trading real funds: read Risks — the 7-day claim deadline is the one risk entirely in your hands.
• Dive deeper: For Traders — task guides for placing orders, managing positions, creating markets, and referrals.
• Understand the mechanics: How It Works — the order book, oracle, and settlement explained.
• Prefer the command line? See CLI examples.

Common questions ("what if my order doesn't fill?", "what are the fees?", "what if the price doesn't change?") are answered in the FAQ.