How to Read Our Order Book
The order book on Mettle Market shows a live snapshot of all current limit orders waiting to be filled—split between people who want to buy and those who want to sell outcome shares (YES or NO).
Here’s how to interpret it:
Buy Orders (Bids): These are traders willing to buy shares at a specific price. They're listed from highest to lowest price. The higher the price, the more eager the buyer.
Sell Orders (Asks): These are traders offering to sell shares at a specific price. They're listed from lowest to highest price. The lower the price, the more eager the seller.
Each row usually shows:
Price – The price per share the user is offering to buy or sell.
Amount – The number of shares the user wants to trade at that price.
For example:
In this example:
The lowest price someone is willing to sell YES shares for is $0.60.
The highest price someone is willing to buy YES shares for is $0.50.
There’s currently no match, so the top orders are waiting in the book.
If you want to buy immediately, you can choose to place a market order, which will fill against the lowest ask. Otherwise, placing a limit order means you’ll wait for someone to meet your price.
Cross-Side Matches
Unlike traditional order books, Mettle Market also supports cross-side matching between buyers of opposing outcomes. This means:
A BUY YES order might match with a BUY NO order—even though they’re both on the “bid” side—as long as their combined prices add up to $1 or more.
This allows traders with opposite beliefs to form a matched contract, increasing the chance of order execution without relying on sellers.
Example
Let’s say the order book looks like this:
BUY YES Orders | BUY NO Orders
Price Amount | Price Amount
$0.42 100 YES | $0.60 100 NO
$0.40 200 YES | $0.58 150 NOIn this case:
The top BUY YES order is willing to pay $0.42.
The top BUY NO order is willing to pay $0.60.
Combined: $0.42 + $0.60 = $1.02 → which exceeds the required $1.00 for a valid binary market match.
These two buyers can be matched with each other, even though neither placed a sell order.
Maker-Taker Priority
Cross-side matches still respect price-time priority:
The first arriving order is the maker
The newer order is the taker
The trade executes at the maker’s price
Locking & Settlement
When a match occurs:
Mettle locks the maker’s price from both traders
In this case, if the BUY YES order came first:
Lock $0.42 from the YES buyer
Lock $0.42 from the NO buyer (even though they bid $0.60)
Execute at $0.42
Mint 100 YES tokens and 100 NO tokens
Assign each to the respective trader
This kind of cross-side matching is unique to Mettle and increases liquidity by letting belief-driven buyers match without needing a passive seller.
This makes the Mettle Market order book more dynamic and efficient than typical binary markets.
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