Inscribe (a reference implementation)

Inscribe is a live injective-888 dApp that exercises the full Injective × Cascade pattern: permanent, re-litigatable prediction markets where every claim, every piece of evidence, and every voter's justification is stored forever on Cascade.

This page is a tour of how it's built. For the message-by-message contract reference and the deploy/CLI scripts, see the Inscribe repository.

The idea

Existing prediction markets settle on ephemeral evidence and undocumented reasoning. Voters cite news articles that get edited, paywalled, or deleted, and they never publish why they voted as they did. Six months after a market closes, you cannot reconstruct what was known, who decided what, or on what basis.

Inscribe fixes this by making three artifacts permanent on Cascade, one set per market:

Settlement is an optimistic, bonded human oracle. There is no AI, no automated truth-detection. The protocol's contribution is making every input and every reasoning step permanent and citable forever, so a market resolved today can be re-litigated by anyone years later with the full decision trail intact.

Architecture

Injective holds the state machine, the escrow, and the bonds. Cascade holds every artifact a verdict depends on. Two small Go services join the two halves so the frontend gets one fast read, and all Cascade writes go through the server-signed cascade-api path (Pattern B).

The three contracts

Inscribe ships as a versioned set of three independently-deployable CosmWasm 2.0 contracts. The wiring between them is per-instance, established at instantiation.

A market locks a proposer or challenger bond by emitting a CosmosMsg::Wasm to bond-vault in the same transaction (the standard CosmWasm pattern for atomic funds-plus-state changes). The full InstantiateMsg / ExecuteMsg / QueryMsg surface lives in the repo.

The services

Both Go binaries live in one module and run independently:

• inscribe-indexer a poll-and-mirror loop. Every ~10s it lists inscribe-market-v2 instances via Injective LCD, smart-queries each market's state, mirrors it into Postgres, and eagerly resolves every referenced Cascade CID into a cascade_cache table. It is stateless across restarts: drop the tables and it refills from chain state within minutes. Polling (not websockets) is chosen because it recovers from any disconnect by simply running another tick.
• inscribe-api a read-only HTTP surface over the indexer's Postgres tables, plus the one write route POST /cascade/upload that forwards to the cascade-api. Its /markets/{addr}/audit endpoint resolves every CID a market references and returns them inline as one JSON blob, so the audit viewer renders without 30 separate browser round-trips.

How a market moves

Every market is a finite state machine. Funds and chain-height windows gate the transitions.

• Open: bettors stake inj into a YES or NO pool (pari-mutuel; the same address may hold both sides), and anyone may submit evidence CIDs.
• Proposed: after the settlement block, anyone posts a verdict with a justification CID and a bond. If the challenge window passes uncontested, finalize_uncontested releases the bond and the verdict stands.
• Challenged: a counter-verdict with its own bond moves the market to a dispute.
• Voting: request_committee samples a committee from voter-registry, weighted by bond × accuracy, seeded from a block hash drawn after the challenge was filed. Each member votes with a mandatory justification CID.
• Final: tally counts votes, slashes the losing bond to the winner, updates voter accuracy, and records the settlement. Winning bettors redeem their pro-rata share; an Invalid resolution refunds everyone 1:1.

Every verdict, challenge, and vote requires a justification artifact uploaded to Cascade before the on-chain call is accepted. The contract never verifies that a citation is sound, but the citation is permanent and public, so a bad-faith actor cannot un-cite later.

Re-litigation: the property that needs permanence

Once a market resolves, the bets are paid and the verdict is on-chain but the truth question stays open forever. Anyone, including people who weren't around when the market existed, can fetch the full record by spec_cid (spec, evidence pool, every justification, the canonical settlement record), form an independent assessment, and upload a counter-argument to the same market's Cascade namespace. It doesn't change the on-chain verdict and doesn't pay out; it becomes a permanent companion record that future markets and scholarship can cite.

This is the property no other prediction-market protocol has: the markets close, but the truth conversation does not. Cascade is the substrate that makes it possible; Injective is the venue where bets pay out. It only works because the artifacts are genuinely permanent, exactly what Cascade provides and IPFS pinning does not.

What's deployed

Wasm checksums are byte-deterministic via cosmwasm/optimizer and verifiable with sha256sum artifacts/<crate>.wasm. The source of truth for code IDs, tx hashes, and checksums is scripts/deployments.json in the repo.

What to take from it

Inscribe is one shape of Injective × Cascade product. The reusable lessons, the contract conventions, the indexer's eager-resolve loop, the state-machine-driven frontend, and the pitfalls to design around are generalized in Build your own integration.

Next steps