popnlocks
Self-settling hashrate derivatives. The chain attests to its own vital signs; the winner pops the lock.
A market with no oracle
A binary market on network difficulty: will consensus difficulty be at or above strike K at the end of the window? Collateral locks into a covenant at deploy. Anyone settles by presenting the real block headers — the covenant verifies linkage, proof-of-work, and difficulty drift in-script and pays the winner.
No reporter. No vote. No dispute window. Forging settlement data requires performing the work being measured.
Two sides lock collateral
YES and NO fund a covenant anchored to a past block. The strike is written into the script.
Locksmiths turn the ladder
Anyone-callable cranks verify headers chunk by chunk, carrying state in continuation outputs. Each crank earns a bounty.
The winner pops the lock
The final crank reads the endpoint target, compares it to the strike, and the covenant pays out. By itself.
Receipts
POP-0, the reference market, ran end-to-end on mainnet on 2026-11-06 — a retro market over the window after block 830000. Sixteen real consensus headers verified on-chain; YES popped the lock. Every transaction mined in block 974267.
Read the full account: popnlocks: the chain settles its own bets · POP-0 spec
Why it exists
Hashrate is the most important unpriced signal in Bitcoin. Miners carry difficulty risk they cannot hedge; everyone else reads hashrate through someone else's dashboard. popnlocks makes the chain the source of its own truth — and pays the keepers who turn the crank.
The oracle is the thing being predicted.