Final update

1. How much money have you spent so far? Have you gotten more funding from other sources? Do you need more funding? I spent a tiny bit on hosting. I don't need more funding.
2. How is the project going? (a few paragraphs) I changed the aim to creation of the bot that allows to easily run private markets inside private group chats. One can add the bot now to any telegram group chat, and create/participate in the markets that are only available inside the group.

I'm very interested in the private use of private markets. MM is a bit of a social club at this point, with a lot of insider memes and personalities. I'd love it if other groups of people could have their own little private markets if they so choose. I think it would be a great way to get people interested in prediction markets. Hence the bot.

At this point I'm not sure if Telegram bot is the most accessible way to get introduced to prediction markets for the people. But I'm very interested in this topic. I'm also not sure if "private" markets are that interesting at all to any kind of wider audience. I know that some organizations have their own internal markets, and I wonder if marketing of this kind of software to firms could be an interesting experiment. Still, I haven't found a niche with much potential.

Currently the bot is used by people simply experimenting by creating random markets, or create them sporadically on specific topics, but there's also one group that uses it for some kinds of gaming predictions. I don't have numbers on the group size due to Telegram's privacy limitations, but I saw around a market created daily with 5-7 bets.

One can try the bot by adding it to a private chat group: @PredictionMarketsBot.

I'd love to try the bot on one of the huge groups (~1000 people) but I don't have a good pitch yet.

I abandoned the idea of integration with Manifold Markets. Such an integration wouldn't really work well with private markets, and to restrict the bot to public markets would be a waste of potential.

Since it's a big pivot with not much of a success, I'll likely buy-out the certificates to return the money to investors who were interested in a different project. 3. How well has your project gone compared to where you expected it to be at this point? (Score from 1-10, 10 = Better than expected) I'm mostly satisfied with the technical progress, but I didn't succeed in finding a wide user base yet. So let's say 5. 4. Are there any remaining ways you need help, besides more funding? If anyone is interested in running private markets, or trying to run them inside a large-ish group they could invite me to, I'd be very interested in that. 5. Any other thoughts or feedback?