Background:

• we’ve attempted many iterations of numeric markets before
• each attempt has made the following mistakes:
  • they’ve added a new market mechanism, creating technical debt that is hard to support
    • [i] not true: the most recent round has been the same sums-to-one multichoice mechanism, just with the added feature of being able to bet on multiple answers at once and a different display.
  • the UI has not been particularly well thought out
  • unclear whether this is a power-user feature involving distributions or a normie-friendly way for users to bet up/down a numeric item
• the better way is to just build on top of our MC markets directly, similar to what Kalshi has done

Proposal:

• build additional UI on top of MC markets to support numeric / date use-cases without creating a new market type
  • [i] that doesn’t really make sense, of course you would make it a new market type to signal it’s a numeric/date type. If you mean mechanism, I agree we don’t want a new mechanism
• use bucketing: 3-10 answers representing ranges for possible numeric/date values
  • market creation flow automatically will suggest buckets given a user-specified range
• compute expectation as main displayed stat on feed, market card
• Show change in expectation over time as main graph
• trading UI is unchanged

Implementation:

• All numeric/date contracts are typical CPMMMulti

  • all of the trading logic should remain exactly the same and shouldn’t require any changes!

• Introduce a new Numeric type to determine display logic (and to be able compute expectation quickly)

  • [i] contradicts ‘without creating a new market type’ above, but I agree

  
  export type Numeric = {
  	displayType: "numeric" | "date"
  	bucketing: "range" | "discrete"
  	scale: "linear" | "log"
  	buckets: number[]
  }
  
  export type CPMMNumeric = Contract & CPMMMulti & Numeric
  
  /* 
  
  if bucketing is "discrete": 
  	first bucket = buckets[0], corresponds to answers[0]
  	
  if bucketing is "range":
  	first bucket = [buckets[0], buckets[1]) 
  	second bucket = [buckets[1], buckets[2])
  	last bucket = [buckets[n-1], buckets[n]]
  */
  

• Create flow

  • New market types for users to choose: Numeric, Date
  • Create form shows users min and max values and will automatically generate bucket values based on the response and determine bucketing type
    • changing the min, max dynamically will change generated buckets
    • for ranges like 1 thru 10, the bucketing type will be “discrete”
      • i.e. each MC answer will be a single number like “2” versus a range like “Feb 2023 - May 2025”
    • ideally, LLMs can be used to figure out these details
      • including the right number of buckets to create
      • and the correct way to display date values
        • ie to determine what level of granularity, to show days, months, or only years
    • users can edit/add/remove bucket values manually too
    • If the buckets are: “100k - 250k”, “250k - 1m”, “1m - 10m”, then the corresponding buckets array would be [1E5, 2.5E5, 1E6, 1E7]

• Market page

  • display the expectation as the main stat
  • graph shows change in expectation over time
    • can be computed from points without any additional caching, I think?

• Market cards / Browse

  • show expectation

• post bet logic

  • update expectation