What are conditionals?

Conditionals bridge the utility of event futures contracts to the broader financial system.

Definition. Conditionals are event futures whose payout is the value of a datapoint (asset price, index, KPI) conditional on the outcome of an event or the terminal price of an asset.

Butter supports two conditional variants:

• Event conditionals: outcomes are real-world event outcomes (e.g., Cut / Hold / Hike).

• Price conditionals: outcomes are terminal price bins at a fixed expiry (e.g., BTC < $60k, $60k–$70k, …).

See Conditional market variants for a full comparison and payoff cookbook.

Where prediction markets price probabilities and options price volatility over time, Conditionals price every branch of the future “as if it happens.”

Examples

One example is a BTC conditional on a Fed cut, hold, or hike outcome.

One example is an S&P 500 conditional on a candidate A win, candidate B win, or candidate C win outcome.

One example is an AAPL conditional on an earnings beat, inline, or miss outcome.

Features

You can speculate on event-driven volatility by trading multiple branches to express dispersion and magnitude without complex derivatives.

You can hedge event risk by trading “BTC if Cut” versus “BTC if Hike” exposure directly, which provides event-contingent insurance for asset holders with minimal basis risk.

One deposit supports all branches simultaneously, since branches share collateral.

Non-realized branches are cancelled at settlement, and the realized branch settles to the observed asset price.

Benefits

Conditionals avoid liquidations and reduce the need to de-risk purely due to upcoming events.

Conditionals let you trade the magnitude of event impacts, not only outcome probabilities.

Conditionals let you hedge event risk without the complexity and basis risk of options.

Conditionals support capital-efficient event-risk hedging for market makers.

Use cases

BTC holders can short BTC|Hike to hedge downside risk in a hike scenario.

You can build CPI and NFP “if-then” baskets, such as long BHP|CPI>consensus and long AAPL|CPI<consensus.

You can trade SPX|Candidate wins or USD|Policy passes to isolate decision risk.

You can trade Stock|Deal approved or Stock|Deal rejected, as well as Token|ETF approved or Token|ETF denied.

You can create structured overlays, such as a portfolio guard like SP500|Recession declared.