the pitch, marked out
How Kickoff works
Kickoff is a prediction market for football where you are paid for how close you land, not just whether you were right. This page explains the whole machine: how markets run, how closeness is measured, how the pool is split, and what keeps settlement honest.
What is Kickoff
Kickoff runs proximity markets on English Premier League fixtures. Instead of betting yes or no on an outcome, you predict a number: the final score of a match, or the fantasy points a player will put up in a gameweek. Everyone who enters a market stakes into one shared pool. When the result is known, the pool pays the traders who landed closest.
There is no house taking the other side of your position. Your counterparty is the rest of the pool, and the maths that splits it is published below and replayable from the recorded positions, byte for byte.
Why proximity beats yes/no
Binary prediction markets ask a coin-flip question and pay a coin-flip answer. They are great for elections and terrible for football, where the interesting knowledge is graded. Knowing Arsenal win 2-1 rather than 4-0 is real, valuable insight, and a binary market throws it away: both answers collapse to "Arsenal win".
Proximity scoring changes what skill gets rewarded:
- ›A 2-1 call when the game ends 2-1 beats a 3-1 call, which beats a 1-0 call, which crushes anyone who called the wrong winner. Every step of precision is worth money.
- ›You can be wrong and still win. If everyone else was further off than you, you are in the paying half of the pool. The bar is the field, not perfection.
- ›Stakes of every size get the same return on accuracy. The pool splits by stake times accuracy, so equal accuracy means equal ROI whether you staked $2 or $200. A whale cannot buy a better percentage, only a bigger absolute position.
Most pool-based competitors stop at "closest wins". Kickoff's engine goes further: a median gate that pays the entire closer half of the field, an accuracy curve that scales rewards smoothly with precision, and a fee that only ever comes out of the losing side. Each of these is specified below.
The life of a market
Listed
A market opens for a fixture with its rules frozen: stake limits, fee rate, accuracy exponent. Nothing about a market changes after it opens. What you see when you stake is what settles.
Open
Traders pick a number and stake USDC into the pool. You can restake to update your pick any time before lock. The pool total and the number of entries are public; a concentration view shows where the crowd sits.
Locked
At kickoff the market locks. No new positions, no edits. From here your position rides the match: live mark-to-model PnL and rank update as the game state changes.
Settled
When the result is final and verified, the engine computes every distance, splits the pool, and payouts are recorded. Settlement is deterministic: same inputs, same result, every time.
Scoring: the distance function
Every position gets a distance D from the actual result. Smaller is better; an exact call is D = 0. For score markets, distance is built from four football-shaped components rather than naive digit difference, because 2-1 and 1-0 are closer as football results than 2-1 and 0-1:
| Component | Measures | Default weight |
|---|---|---|
| Outcome | Did you call the right winner (or a draw)? | 4.0 penalty if wrong |
| Goal difference | How far off the winning margin you were (capped at 3) | 1.0 per goal |
| Total goals | How far off the total score you were (capped at 4) | 0.5 per goal |
| Clean sheets | Whether you called each side keeping a clean sheet | 0.25 per miss |
The outcome penalty dominates by design: calling the wrong winner puts you at least 4.0 behind anyone who called it right, and the caps stop one freak scoreline from stretching distances into noise. For player perps the distance is simply the absolute gap between your points call and the player's official final points.
Winning and payouts
Settlement runs in three moves.
1. The median gate
Rank every position by distance. Positions strictly closer than the median distance win; the rest lose. One trader, one vote: the gate counts heads, not stakes, so a whale cannot drag the median toward their own guess. Roughly the closer half of the field gets paid.
2. The best-coalition rule
If the single closest distance is shared by at least half the field, that closest group alone wins. This keeps an obvious consensus call from being diluted by the median arithmetic.
3. The split
Losing stakes fund the dividend pool (after the fee, below). Each winner's share is proportional to stake times accuracy weight, where accuracy is a = (1 / (1 + r))^3 and r is your distance relative to the median. Exact calls get a = 1, the maximum. Barely-in winners still profit, but precision is paid on a curve, not a cliff.
Winners always keep their full stake and receive their share of the dividend pool on top. A single win is capped at 100x stake, with any overflow water-filled to the other winners, so one lucky $0.50 ticket cannot drain a pool.
A worked example
Five traders stake $10 each on a score market. The match ends 2-1.
| Trader | Pick | Distance D | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 2-1 | 0.00 | wins |
| B | 1-0 | 1.25 | wins |
| C | 3-1 | 1.50 | loses (at the median) |
| D | 1-1 | 5.50 | loses |
| E | 0-2 | 7.75 | loses |
The median distance is 1.50, so A and B win (strictly closer than the median; C sits exactly on it and lands with the losers). Losing stakes total $30. The 10% fee takes $3, leaving a $27 dividend pool.
A called it exactly (a = 1.0, weight 10). B's relative distance gives a ≈ 0.16 (weight ≈ 1.6). The pool splits on those weights:
| Trader | Gain | Total payout | ROI |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | ≈ $23.23 | ≈ $33.23 | +232% |
| B | ≈ $3.77 | ≈ $13.77 | +38% |
| C, D, E | $0 | $0 | -100% |
Both winners profit, but exactness is worth six times more. That gap is the accuracy curve doing its job: it is why grinding out precise reads beats spraying safe guesses.
Player perps
Player perps are proximity markets on a single player's official Fantasy Premier League pointsfor one gameweek. You call a number (7.5, 12, 2), stake, and the same engine settles on the absolute gap between your call and the player's final FPL score.
- ›Settlement waits for FPL's own final data check, not just full time, because bonus points and stat corrections land after the whistle. Your market settles on the number the whole fantasy world settles on.
- ›The FPL scoring rubric (goals, assists, clean sheets, bonus, cards) is public and identical for everyone, which makes it the cleanest possible oracle for player performance.
Fees and the Season Accumulator
Kickoff takes 10% of the losing stakes only. Winners' stakes are never touched, void markets pay nothing, and there are no deposit, withdrawal, or per-trade fees. If nobody loses, Kickoff earns nothing.
The take splits in half:
- ›5% platform: runs the product.
- ›5% Season Accumulator: accrues into a season-long prize pool, publicly visible on the leaderboard page, paid out at season end to the top of the season leaderboard. Every settled market on Kickoff makes the season prize bigger.
The leaderboard score rewards sustained accuracy across many markets, not one lucky hit, so the Accumulator is a season-long reason to keep making good calls.
Settlement integrity
A pool market is only as good as the number it settles on. Kickoff's results pipeline is built like an oracle, not a scraper:
- ›Multiple independent sources. Full-time results are cross-checked across independent data providers and only finalize on agreement. A single feed glitching cannot settle a market wrong.
- ›A finality delay. Results sit through a cooling-off window before settlement, absorbing late corrections, VAR reversals recorded after the whistle, and feed errors.
- ›Disputes fail safe. If sources disagree or go quiet, the market is flagged and held for review instead of settling on bad data. The failure mode is a delay, never a wrong payout.
- ›Deterministic replay. Settlement is pure integer arithmetic over recorded positions. Anyone with the inputs can recompute every payout to the exact base unit.
- ›Every admin action is logged. Listing, opening, settling, voiding: each action is recorded with its full payload in an append-only audit trail.
Wallets and money
- ›Stakes are in USDC. All amounts settle in 6-decimal base units, matching the token exactly, so there is no rounding anywhere in the money path.
- ›Sign in with email or a wallet. Email sign-ins get an embedded wallet created automatically, so you never handle seed phrases to play.
- ›Kickoff currently runs on testnet with play money. The full product works end to end: real fixtures, real settlement pipeline, test USDC. Mainnet cutover is a config change, not a rebuild, and will be announced.
Getting access
Kickoff is opening in waves. The waitlist collects your email; invite codes go out as each wave opens. A code is single use and unlocks the full app: markets, live PnL, leaderboard, positions.
This documentation, and the landing page, are public. The markets are the club.
FAQ
What happens if my match is postponed or abandoned?
The market voids and every stake is refunded in full. No fees are taken on void markets.
Can I change my prediction after staking?
Yes, any time before the market locks at kickoff. Restaking replaces your previous pick. After lock, positions are final.
Is there a payout estimate before I stake?
Kickoff shows the pool size and how many current entries would win with your pick, but never a projected payout figure. In an open pool any payout number would be a guess that goes stale with the next stake, so we do not show one.
Why did my position lose when I was pretty close?
Winning is relative to the field, not to an absolute standard. If the median distance was tighter than your distance, more than half the pool was closer than you. Positions exactly at the median lose: the gate is strictly closer-than.
What stops one giant stake from rigging a market?
The win/lose gate counts traders, not dollars, so stake size has zero influence on where the median falls. Size only scales your own share within the winners, and a 100x-stake cap bounds any single payout.
Where does the losing money go?
90% becomes the winners' dividend pool, 5% goes to the platform, and 5% accrues to the Season Accumulator prize paid at season end.