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counsel is an L1-native parimutuel prediction market on the XRP Ledger. There is no bridge, no smart contract, and no database of record: the ledger is the registry, the pool, and the audit trail. As a developer you read markets over a public REST API, construct an unsigned XRPL Payment, and sign it yourself in your own wallet. This quickstart takes you through the canonical developer path: list markets, construct a bet, sign and submit it.
No API key is required. The REST API is read-only and public. counsel never holds your key and never signs for you: you always sign your own transactions in your own wallet. Non-custodial by construction.
1

Call the public API and read live odds

List open markets and read the live tote board. Each outcome reports implied_prob (the outcome’s share of the pool) and payout_per_unit (the indicative XRP returned per 1 XRP staked if that outcome wins, after the fee).
curl https://api.counsel.markets/markets
Pick a market and the outcome index you want to back. The outcome index becomes the DestinationTag of your bet Payment.
2

Construct an unsigned bet

Ask the API to build the bet for you. GET /markets/:id/bet-intent takes your account, the outcome index, and the amount in XRP, and returns an unsigned XRPL Payment plus the projected odds after your stake is added to the pool.
curl "https://api.counsel.markets/markets/MARKET_ID/bet-intent?account=YOUR_ADDRESS&outcome=0&amount=5"
The Payment is a native XRP Payment to the market’s pool account, with DestinationTag set to the outcome index and SourceTag set to counsel’s attribution tag. The projected odds let you preview your stake’s effect on the tote board before you commit.
Odds are indicative while a market is open and become final at bet_cutoff. A flat 3% fee is taken from the whole gross pool before the split, never selectively on winners.
3

Sign and submit it

Sign the unsigned Payment with your own key in your own wallet (Xaman, GemWallet, Crossmark, or any XRPL client), then submit it to the XRP Ledger. counsel is non-custodial: the signature happens entirely on your side.The counsel-js SDK wraps fetch, sign, and submit into a single call when you bring your own seed.
import { Counsel } from "counsel-js";

const counsel = new Counsel({ baseUrl: "https://counsel.markets" });
const { markets } = await counsel.markets();

// fetch an unsigned bet intent, sign with your own key, submit
const hash = await counsel.placeBet(process.env.BOT_SEED, markets[0].id, 0, 5);
console.log("bet placed:", hash);
Once the transaction validates, your stake is in the pool. The pool sits in a per-market account secured by a multisig SignerList with the master key disabled, so no single key can move funds, and everything is on-chain and recomputable.

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Next steps

API Overview

The full read-only REST surface: markets, positions, feeds, profiles, and the leaderboard.

Building Bots

A bot is an ordinary XRPL client. Read a market, fetch an unsigned intent, sign with its own key, and submit.