A prediction game only works if people believe the results are real. The usual answer is to ask players to take the operator's word for it. We do not want to be trusted that way, so we built the record to prove itself.
What actually happens now
Every action in FORKcast, each market opening, each pick, each pool, and each payout, gets hashed and folded into a Merkle tree. A Merkle tree is a way of compressing a huge list of events into a single short fingerprint called a root. Change any one event, even by a single character, and the root comes out completely different. There is no quiet edit.
We publish those roots in two places. Each root is anchored on-chain, and the underlying
record is pinned to IPFS, a public distributed file network. Anyone can pull the record,
rebuild the tree, and confirm the root matches what we posted. The read-only endpoints at
/api/anchor hand you the roots and the inclusion proofs to do it.
An inclusion proof lets you confirm that one specific event is part of a published root without trusting us and without even being online with us. Grab your pick, grab the proof, run the check on your own machine. If it passes, that pick is provably in the record. If we ever tried to rewrite it, the proof would fail.
On testnet now, mainnet at launch
Right now the roots are posted to BNB Smart Chain testnet, with a fresh root going up on a regular schedule. Testnet lets us prove the whole pipeline end to end without spending real gas while the platform is still in its build phase. When Forked reaches its official launch, the anchoring moves to mainnet and the same guarantees carry over.
Why it matters
This is the difference between a game that says it is fair and a game that can show it. The record is public, it is tamper evident, and it does not depend on our reputation. Every other thing we build on top of FORKcast inherits that same footing, because the history underneath it is locked.