To the investors of Manifold:

Top asks

• Get your ticket to Bet on Love, the world’s first prediction market dating show hosted by Manifold live in SF on Feb 10th.
• Recommend us an accountant. I’m thinking of switching away from Pilot.

Key developments

• Politics: We’ve launched the v0 version of our 2024 US elections site, complete with live-updating probabilities on the presidential and primary elections and an electoral map. This is just a dashboard on the main Manifold site today, but our plan is to build out a separate site devoted exclusively to US politics. This will be our top priority this quarter.

  

• Metrics

• Bet on Love: We’re hosting a prediction market dating show event live in SF on Feb 10th (Saturday before Valentine’s). Get your tickets now before we sell out (or watch the livestream). If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, you can see our sponsorship tiers here.
• Manifold Love: grew 50% in the last month from 1000 to 1500+ profiles. Shout out to Frankie, who is doing a great job running the Twitter account.
• New features: improved boosts, improved betting interface, market/bet “retweets” to the feed, infrastructure improvements
• In the pipeline: Manifold Politics site, Manifold $30k Community Fund, Bet on Love

Quick thoughts

• Our semi-competitor Polymarket has recently seen record trading volumes, mostly on their politics markets, in part due to being “re-truthed” twice by Trump (which may be the first time a president has publicly linked to a prediction market). I’m a little sad that this wasn’t us, but I take it as a strong signal that this is the right area to focus on.
• In many ways, all the stars have aligned for us to take over the political forecasting space: 538 has been sold to ABC and no longer has access to Nate Silver’s electoral model, the raison d’etre of the site; PredictIt is embroiled in legal and regulatory turmoil and may be forced to shut down; and Kalshi’s application to host election markets was rejected by the CFTC. Manifold is in a strong a position as any company could be to become the most trusted global brand in political forecasting.
• We are talking with the government of Singapore this week to see if we can assist them in forecasting housing prices, covid cases, and other areas of concern. We’re interested in exploring this use-case of partnering with institutions to deliver custom analysis based on our markets as an alternate business model for Manifold. You can read some of our scattered thoughts on the topic here:Further monetization ideas. If you know of any potentially interested clients, please let us know. We’re still trying to gauge demand.