Hi Manifolders! As some of you may have seen, a mysterious pivot for Manifold is on the horizon. While we aren’t quite ready to share the details, we wanted to let you know to expect many changes as we begin to lay the groundwork.

Our focus in the upcoming week will be to firm up the mana supply and ensure a sustainable mana economy. We hope through these changes and future changes, we will be able to make mana more valuable to you. This will be an iterative process, but I wanted to share what you can expect in the immediate future.

Creating a sustainable economy

• Poll cost reduced to 10 mana.
  • Our priority is to ensure there are still many cheap ways for everyone to enjoy using Manifold!
• Loans will come to an end in May. What does this mean?
  • The 30th of April is the last day to claim a new loan.
  • By default, we’ll honor existing loans. This means your account will still be leveraged until the markets which generated your loans have their positions closed.
  • We are currently discussing other solutions to incentivise trading on longer-term markets. Please let us know your ideas!
  • Fun fact: There is currently ~69,830,000 mana held in loans.
• Transaction fees on trades
  • Manifold will charge a fee on market-taking trades. Market-making orders (ie limit orders that are not immediately filled) will have no fees, but everything else will.
    • Limit orders partially or entirely filled by the AMM will be charged a fee on the portion immediately executed.
    • For clarity - trading into someone’s outstanding limit order will incur you fees, but not the limit order holder.
  • 50% of the fee goes to the market creator, 50% goes to Manifold.
  • This change allows us to remove the existing fees when users add additional subsidies!
  • In practice, fees can vary from nearly nothing to almost 7% on long-shot bets.
  • E.g. bets with a midpoint of 50% probability will incur a 3.5% fee.
  • Selling shares counts as a trade and will also incur fees.
  • Formula: Fees = (shares) * prob * (1-prob) * 0.07
    • Where prob is the average probability you placed your bet at. E.g. if your trade moved the market from 50% to 60% then roughly 0.55 will be used to calculate fees (the exact number will be slightly higher due to how AMM works).
    • The direction of the bet does not matter.
    • All numbers are subject to change
• Eliminating subsidy fee
  • We’re eliminating the 25% fee we charged on market liquidity subsidies. You can now subsidize your markets for free!
• Phasing out unique trader bonuses.
  • Our long-term plan is to replace the trader bonuses entirely with creators receiving a share of transaction fees.
  • For now, creators will receive both unique trader bonuses and their share of transaction fees as we assess the numbers.

Tightening exploits, alts and fraud

• Starting today, a 50,000 mana bounty is available for the first person who reports unknown infinite mana exploits.
• Unlisted markets will no longer be able to be created. Markets currently unlisted will remain unlisted.
  • Unlisted markets were mostly used to hide mistakes (these markets should just be deleted) or exploits. Almost no one uses them for trading privately with friends.
  • Unlisting markets will still remain as a mod tool to use against spam or markets that don’t meet our guideline standards.
• Manalinks will be disabled for everyone except admins. Since the introduction of managrams, manalinks have been made redundant and are used now to hide behaviour against our guidelines.
• New users will need to verify their phone to receive the signup bonus.
  • We are still iterating on access unverified users have compared to verified users.
  • The signup bonus has been reduced to 200 from 1000. This is always subject to change.
• Move towards not allowing creators to trade in their own markets under certain circumstances. To be decided to what extent this will be after gathering more feedback.
• To firm up the mana supply, we have found all accounts that were mostly unused and reduced their mana to 200.
  • About half of all users fit these criteria:
    • No bets this year and less than 10 bets all-time.
    • No markets created that have at least 1 trader.
    • < 1700 mana balance.
    • Have not purchased mana before.
  • We were able to reduce outstanding mana balances by 30 million from this, which helps keep inflation under check and makes mana scarce like a real currency.

While, in isolation, such a strong focus on Manifold’s mana economy may seem odd, please be patient with us as we work towards our long-term plan. As a reminder, you can expect all of the changes outlined to be individually introduced over the next week or two.