Methodology

Paddle Supernova lists lots from publicly announced upcoming auctions at major international houses: Christie's, Sotheby's, Phillips, Bonhams, Heritage, and select regional and specialist houses where catalog quality allows verification.

Lots are added to the catalog after the auction house publishes its official online catalog, typically 2–4 weeks before the sale. We require a public estimate range (low and high) and a confirmed sale date before a lot is listed. We do not accept private sales, post-war and modern works with no public catalog page, or lots where estimate data is embargoed.

Each lot carries an auction date, house name, sale name, lot number, artist name, and title as displayed in the official catalog. Estimate ranges are reproduced in USD at the exchange rate prevailing at the time of ingestion; original currency is also stored.

The prediction market for each lot opens when the lot is added to our catalog and locks 1 hour before the scheduled auction start time. After locking, no new predictions are accepted and existing positions cannot be altered.

Every Paddle Supernova market resolves against a single, published rule:

YES if the hammer price strictly exceeds the low estimate. NO if the hammer price is at or below the low estimate. VOID if the lot is withdrawn, bought in at no bid, or if a verifiable hammer price cannot be obtained within 14 days of the auction.

These rules are enforced automatically by the platform when an administrator records a settlement. The winning side receives points distributed proportionally to their position size; each payout is permanently logged. When a lot is voided, all staked points are returned in full with no redistribution.

Settlement is triggered manually by an administrator after the hammer price is confirmed from at least one authoritative source (see Data sources). The source URL and timestamp are recorded against the outcome record. All settlements are visible on each lot's detail page.

Points are credited within 24 hours of a confirmed sale result. Where results are delayed by the auction house, settlement may take up to 72 hours.

A bought-in result occurs when the highest bid at auction fails to reach the reserve price and the lot is not sold. A pass occurs when no bids are received.

In both cases, there is no hammer price, and the market resolves as VOID. All points staked on that lot are returned to participants in full. No points are redistributed between YES and NO holders.

Why VOID rather than NO? A bought-in result does not reflect the market's opinion on the lot's value — it reflects a gap between seller expectations and buyer demand on the day. Forcing a NO outcome would penalise predictors who correctly assessed intrinsic value but not the seller's reserve. VOID preserves integrity by not rewarding either side for an inherently ambiguous result.

Paddle Supernova is a skill-based prediction product. The distinction matters in law — the United Kingdom Gambling Act 2005 and the comparable gaming statutes of EU/EEA member states draw the line between gaming and skill on whether outcomes are dominated by chance or by the participant's exercise of judgment. It also matters in practice: a serious participant should be able to see why repeated effort here pays off, in a way that effort spent on a roulette wheel does not. Five structural features of the product carry that argument.

1. Public catalog accessibility. Every lot we list is drawn from a publicly published auction catalog — typically released two to four weeks before the sale. The estimate range, provenance line, condition report, saleroom notice, and (where applicable) third-party guarantee disclosure are all visible to any participant who chooses to read them. The raw material a skilled predictor works from is the same raw material the auction-house specialist works from.

2. Comparables analysis as a learned discipline. Predicting where a lot will hammer relative to its low estimate is, in substance, a comparables exercise: prior sales of the same artist, period, and medium; recent demand signals; the visual character of the work versus what the market has rewarded recently. This is a skill that improves with practice —participants who read more catalogs and track more results get measurably better, in the same way a chess player who reviews more games does.

3. Disclosed guarantor structures as tradeable signal. Major houses are required to disclose third-party guarantees in the saleroom notice attached to the lot. A participant who understands what a guarantee implies about the floor under a price — and what the guarantor's financing fee means for incentive alignment — has a real information edge over a participant who does not. That edge is built through study of the catalog, not through luck.

4. Leaderboard persistence over multiple sale cycles. Pure chance regresses to the mean within a few hundred trials: in a game of luck, no individual sustains a top-decile position across many cycles. Paddle Supernova's leaderboard is the empirical test — as the catalog of settled lots grows, persistent top performers will emerge if (and only if) skill is what is being measured. Participants and observers can verify the claim by watching it.

5. A live dispute process. Skill-based products publish their scoring rules and accept challenges to specific outcomes; pure-chance products do not, because there is nothing to dispute. The dispute process described in the next section is, in itself, a hallmark of a skill product. Every settlement is tied to a recorded source URL and timestamp, and any participant can challenge an outcome on the basis of contrary published evidence.

None of the foregoing is a substitute for the regulatory analysis that governs whether the Service is lawfully offered in any particular jurisdiction. See the Eligibility Policy for the jurisdictional posture.

If you believe a lot has been settled incorrectly, you may raise a dispute within 72 hours of the settlement timestamp by emailing disputes@paddlesupernova.com with the lot URL and your evidence (a direct link to the auction house result page or an official press release showing the hammer price).

The editorial team will review the submitted evidence against our recorded source within 5 business days. If the outcome is revised, affected points are recalculated and the ledger is updated. Revision decisions are final.

We do not accept disputes based on unofficial reports, social media posts, or secondary market data. Official auction house result pages and published post-sale press releases are the only accepted evidence.

Paddle Supernova uses the following authoritative sources for lot data and hammer prices. Each resolved lot's detail page shows the source URL and retrieval timestamp for the hammer price used in settlement.

Where a second independent source is available (e.g., the Artnet Price Database, Invaluable, or an officially published press release), we cross-reference it before settlement. Discrepancies between sources are investigated before any points move.

Every prediction, payout, and point movement is permanently recorded in an append-only ledger. Each entry is linked to the one before it by a cryptographic fingerprint, forming a chain that makes undetected tampering with historical records computationally infeasible. A daily summary of that chain is published at /status/audit, giving any participant an independent reference point against which to verify the platform's history.

Access controls on all write paths ensure that participants can only submit predictions under their own account and cannot modify or delete them. Administrators can record settlement outcomes but cannot alter the permanent payout history. These constraints are enforced at the database level, not only in application code.