Settle, Hold or Void: How a Settlement Decision Gets Made

An event moves through six states, every move is one verb, and below the confidence threshold the answer is hold, not a guess.

Every event in PLLAY's settlement contract is in one of six states: open, locked, held, settled, reversed or voided. Every move between them is a single verb, drawn from a small fixed set of operations in an OpenAPI 3.1 file. No other verbs exist.

An event is opened with the outcome to be read and a confidence threshold, then locked. At settle time the confidence is compared with the threshold. At or above it, the event can settle and returns the outcome, the confidence, the evidence and a settlement_id. Below it, the API refuses to settle with a below_threshold error, and the answer is hold. On live video, a reviewer is added before settle.

A hold is a successful response, not an error. It means the system did not have enough to decide and will not guess. From held, an event can still move to settled once an outcome is confirmed, or to voided.

Voided is the other way out. An event can be voided from open, locked or held when there is no result to settle.

Settled is not final in every case. A partner can contest a settlement by flagging its settlement_id within 72 hours of the event settling. If the contest succeeds, the event moves to reversed and a compensating entry is written as a new record that references the original settlement_id. The original record is never edited, and a reversal_settlement_id points at the new one.

The result is a ledger you can read in order: one settlement_id per outcome, a separate id for each reversal, and the evidence behind both. The machine is small on purpose, so a partner can follow any decision from the event to its evidence.