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Settlement patterns

A market needs more than a spot exchange of two assets. Real settlement is conditional: delivery against payment, funds released only when an event is proven, positions that pay out on a Bitcoin fact or on a signed price. Each pattern below is a way to build one of those conditions from the same primitives — hashlocks, timelocks, CTV, CSFS, TX_CONFIRMED — so that a market builder does not have to trust an intermediary to hold the funds in between.

PatternThe condition it settles
Delivery-versus-payment and OTCboth legs settle or neither does; size can stay hidden
Conditional escrowexecute on a proven event, refund on timeout, no agent holds the principal
Hedging on Bitcoin factsa payout selected by Bitcoin difficulty read inside consensus
Fixed-term value positionsa bilateral, collateralised payoff on a signed reference price

These are compositions of primitives that any market builder can assemble, not shipped products. Each page lists its primitives; the covenant surface is documented in Script & opcodes.

See also: Native BTC ⇄ M1 · Build your first application