TLDR: Manifold is exploring real cash prizes!
Dear members of the Manifold community,
It’s been a bit over two years since we launched Manifold. In that time, we’ve gone from a crazy, untested idea to the world’s largest prediction market platform by page views, number of traders, and number of markets, as well as a trusted epistemic authority on geopolitics, US elections, OpenAI shenanigans, and scientific controversies like LK-99.
We’re grateful to you all, the Manifold community, for your well-calibrated bets, lovingly crafted markets, and insightful comments.
…But we still believe Manifold’s mission of increasing human understanding through market-based forecasting is far from reaching its full potential.
Many of you have been feverishly speculating on what our upcoming pivot entails and what it means for the future of Manifold, and now it’s time for all these markets to resolve!
We are working today on a killer feature that will supercharge your forecasts: real cash prizes. Our plan is to enable cash payouts under the sweepstakes model, as used by sites like Fliff and Chumba.
Mana will remain as a purely play-money currency used to bet on markets. But, some markets will payout sweepstakes Prize Points instead of Mana. Prize Points can be either converted back into mana or be redeemed for cash. The sweepstakes model has more restrictions and is importantly different from real-cash betting, but we hope it provides the incentive people need to bring higher quality forecasting to our platform.
The path to enabling cash payouts will be long and uncertain. It’s possible it won’t happen at all. We are working very closely with our lawyers, but it’s likely we won’t be able to roll out payouts for at least another month or two.
We understand many of our users are only here today because Manifold is play money. We acknowledge that changes made to accommodate this pivot might make the experience worse for you if you don’t care about winning cash prizes. We’ve spent many hours discussing ways to try to make the transition as easy as possible and respect the time you’ve invested. Ultimately, we hope many of you will be excited about this new direction, but recognize some of you will be disappointed. We want to hear your feedback and ideas for how we can continue to make Manifold fun for you.
That said, with real cash prizes involved, we can no longer be so cavalier about giving out mana. For this reason, we plan to reduce bonuses, shore up rules on market resolutions, and ensure the mana supply grows at a sustainable rate. To that end, the mana purchase rate of $1 will rise from M100 to M1,000. Our tentative plan is for Prize Points to also be in the realm of 1000 : 1 to USD once cashouts are enabled. This is a one-off change to ensure that we will be able to financially back any prizes we issue in the future.
Users will be able to donate their mana at the existing rate of M100 : $1 for the next week before we switch over to the new system. There will be no donation cap going forward and Manifold looks forward to donating tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars this week to charities of your choice.
One week may not be enough time for users with larger portfolios to donate. We want to work individually with anyone who feels like they are stuck in this situation and honor their expected returns and agree on an amount they can donate at the original 100:1 rate past the one week deadline once the relevant markets have resolved.
We are truly excited to bring you this change and hope that you can look past the messiness of this transition to the near future, where a larger fraction of the world’s population is using prediction markets to inform their analysis.
We will be in our Discord’s voice chat to answer any questions and listen to feedback which will be compiled into a public FAQ.
Thanks for your support, and may all your bets be in your favor!