> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.mesha.fun/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Under the Hood

> What has to be true, technically, for a five-second trade to be fair.

## Latency is the product

A tile lives for seconds. In that window quotes must refresh, your tap must land, and settlement must finalize — all before the price line moves on. That constraint dictated the entire stack: Mesha runs on a high-throughput EVM chain where blocks arrive in milliseconds, throughput reaches tens of thousands of transactions per second, and gas is cheap enough that even a \$0.1 tap makes economic sense.

Full EVM compatibility isn't an accident either — it means the contracts can be read, verified, and poked at with the standard tooling every Solidity developer already has.

## The life of a tap

From your finger to final settlement, four independent parties touch the trade:

<Steps>
  <Step title="Makers quote">
    Market makers stream competing multipliers into every tile, updating many times per second.
  </Step>

  <Step title="You commit">
    Your tap submits the trade straight from your self-custody smart account.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Contracts escrow">
    Mesha's on-chain contracts record the position and lock both sides' value — your stake and the maker's payout.
  </Step>

  <Step title="The oracle rules">
    An independent price feed determines whether your tile was actually touched in time. The contracts settle accordingly.
  </Step>
</Steps>

<Frame caption="Trade flow: maker quote → your tap → on-chain escrow → oracle settlement">
  <img src="https://mintcdn.com/mesha/2TusWpt_nNEzsWOI/images/diagram.jpg?fit=max&auto=format&n=2TusWpt_nNEzsWOI&q=85&s=23c117d76264276dcd56e23727cbbc71" alt="Diagram" title="Diagram" lightAlt="Diagram" darkAlt="Diagram" className="dark:hidden" width="2400" height="840" data-path="images/diagram.jpg" />

  <img src="https://mintcdn.com/mesha/2TusWpt_nNEzsWOI/images/trade-flow-diagram.png?fit=max&auto=format&n=2TusWpt_nNEzsWOI&q=85&s=fef3c38a4a4f570ffda614c6b549c4c8" alt="Diagram" title="Diagram" lightAlt="Diagram" darkAlt="Diagram" className="hidden dark:block" width="2400" height="840" data-path="images/trade-flow-diagram.png" />
</Frame>

## Nobody gets to decide the outcome

That last step is the important one. Win or lose is never a judgment call — it's read off a dedicated oracle feed built on trusted external market data. The feed:

* establishes the reference price of the underlying market
* answers one objective question: did price enter your tile before the line passed?
* sits outside the control of both Mesha and every quoting firm

If the externally observed price touched your tile, you won. If it didn't, you lost. There is no third possibility and no one to argue with — which is precisely the point.