Contact

Colophon

How this site is made.

A static site with its own dot-matrix font, a logo cut from two letters, and a market that never trades. These are the parts, and the rules the words follow.

The LED display

A font drawn one dot at a time.

Each character is a bitmap typed into src/lib/led.ts as rows of # and ., a lit dot and an unlit one. Pages draw them as SVG when the site is built, and readouts that change after load draw the same glyphs in the browser.

Displays light up column by column the first time they scroll into view, unless you have asked your system for less motion.

Letters · 26

Figures · 10

Signs · 22

Pictograms · 6

The mark

Fig. 1 The complete set in src/lib/led.ts: 58 characters, each seven dots tall and at most five wide, plus 6 pictograms and the mark. A character the set doesn’t have is drawn as a space, which, as you can see, is also a glyph.

The mark

A C and a G, cut into five bars.

One glyph holds both letters. A ring with a mouth makes the C, and the G adds a crossbar and the stem below it. Cut the pair with horizontal lines and each slice becomes a bar, the way resting size stacks up in an order book.

The logo draws the bars solid. The LED displays draw the same bars in dots, with an empty row between bars, so the C and the G survive the change of texture. Both come from src/lib/mark.js, which draws the favicons too.

Solid, for the logo and icons

Dots, for the LED displays

Fig. 2 Ink is the C. Cobalt is exactly what a G adds to a C: the crossbar and the stem below it. Drag toward thirty and the two letters reappear; drag toward two and they turn into a bar chart. The site uses 5 slices: the boldest cut, and the one that still reads at 16 pixels.

The market board

A contract that never trades.

The board on the home page runs an event contract from listing to resolution in about 16 seconds, then starts another. It is a stylized model running in your browser. Nothing on it comes from a market, and it is labelled as a simulation wherever it appears.

A hidden driver
A number W takes a small random step every tick and, in about 6 ticks out of every thousand, a much bigger one: the news. The contract pays 100¢ if W finishes above a strike k.
Fair value
At each step, fair value is the probability that W ends above k, given where it is now and how much time is left: the formula in the box. It wanders, and at the deadline it is forced to 0 or 1.
The quote
Bid and ask sit either side of fair value in whole cents. The half-width is 0.4¢ plus 2.8¢ × p(1 − p), so it is widest near 50¢ (the spread note explains why), plus a boost after big moves that fades as the book settles.
The futures
Ahead of “now”, simulated futures branch from the same point and each runs out to 0¢ or 100¢. The YES share at the right edge is the fraction that end at 100. Each future keeps its own fixed noise, so the fan reshapes smoothly from step to step.
Manners
It pauses off-screen and in background tabs, has a Pause button, and shows one still frame if you have asked your system for reduced motion.

The model, in one line

p(s) = Φ((W(s) − k) / √(v · (T − s)))

T
420 steps, listing to resolution
v
1 + 0.006 × 7² ≈ 1.29, the driver’s variance per step, jumps included
Half-width
0.4¢ + 2.8¢ · p(1 − p), plus a boost after big moves
Futures
48 on the board, 24 on narrow screens
Tick
46 ms, so a contract takes about 16 s
First seed
73; later contracts use random seeds

From src/scripts/market-sim.ts. Φ is the standard normal distribution.

Fig. 3 Seed 73, from listing to resolution, computed when this page was built. It lists at 43¢, is at 59¢ when the home board first appears, falls as low as 11¢ and resolves YES. Opening the board with an outcome it had priced low is deliberate. Illustrative simulation, not market data.

Type & colour

Two typefaces and one blue.

Both typefaces are served from this domain. Every text colour passes WCAG AA on the page, the light panel and the dark panel, and the two chart colours were checked for colour-vision deficiency.

Quote, fill, mark, settle.

Width 62 88 100 125

Archivo, one variable file with weight (100–900) and width (62–125%) axes. Everything you read, at a medium weight; figures run a little condensed.

61¢ bid · 63¢ offered · 100 a side

IBM Plex Mono, at two weights. Labels, chips, buttons and readouts, set in capitals with a little tracking.

  • Paper #fafaf8 The page itself
  • Panel #ecebe6 Light panels, for reading
  • Ink #111111 Headings, figures, the C
  • Cobalt #2344e8 The one signal colour, and the G
  • Screen #121313 Dark panels and LED boards
  • Cobalt, lit #7d95ff Cobalt on a dark panel
  • Ochre #c47a12 The second chart series
  • Loss #b23418 Negative figures

The build

Static files, no server code.

Built ahead of time
Astro renders each page to plain HTML and CSS when the site is built. There is no server code, database or login behind it; a Cloudflare Worker serves the files as they are.
Two outside scripts
No ad scripts, and no fonts from a CDN. Two outside scripts count visits: Cloudflare’s cookieless Web Analytics beacon, added at the edge, and Google Analytics, which sets first-party cookies. Privacy has the details.
A strict content policy
Each page carries a Content-Security-Policy that lists a hash for every script and style the build emits and refuses the rest, inline style attributes included, so even a diagram’s geometry lives in a stylesheet.
Readable by everyone
Charts come with a table of the same values for screen readers, animation stops if you prefer reduced motion, and pages are audited with axe-core against WCAG 2.2 AA.
Ready for the printer
Pages print black on white without the navigation, for reviewers who save the Firm, Record and Legal pages as PDFs.

Content rules

What the words won’t do.

Venues, banks and counterparties read this site as well as the curious, so the copy follows a few fixed rules. They are why some pages say less than you might expect.

  1. 01

    Venues named, contracts not.

    We name the venues we quote on, and say that we take part in their liquidity programs. We don’t name the markets, events or tickers we trade, or what a program pays: a name beside a contract could read as a pointer to a position.

  2. 02

    Figures keep their dates.

    One activity figure is on the Record, with its as-of date and method, refreshed monthly. Results go only to the people who ask, with the full record and its notes, and a figure in a research note comes dated and with its method. A figure separated from its date is a different figure.

  3. 03

    No investor vocabulary.

    No returns, yields or annualized rates. We have no investors to answer, and a firm that moves its own capital in and out has no single honest denominator.

  4. 04

    Examples are made up, and look it.

    Worked examples use invented contracts (Station A, Outcome A) and round numbers, so none of them can be read as a view on a real event.

  5. 05

    Contract words.

    Quote, fill, mark, width, settle. These are contracts with rulebooks, and we describe them in their own vocabulary.

  6. 06

    Nothing for sale.

    No offers, sign-ups, advice or tips. The things this site asks you to do are read, try the quiz, and email us.

Spotted a typo, a broken link or a stuck pixel? Email contact@cipherg.io.