Mantic Markets is a decentralized prediction market where individuals create and resolve their own markets, in exchange for a percent of the bet volume.
Prediction markets are a place where anyone can place bets on the future.
Take a question like: "Will Democrats or Republicans win the 2024 US presidential election?" If I think the Democrats are very likely to win, and you disagree, I might offer $70 to your $30; whoever is right would take home $100.
Someone watching the bet, with no other knowledge of US politics, could conclude that there's a roughly 70% chance of Democrat victory. This is pretty amazing! Both you and I are putting our money where our mouths are, and the result is that observers learn something new about the world.
Scale this idea up to allow lots of people to place bets on either side, and you get a prediction market. Examples today include:
Mantic Markets opens up market creation and resolution to individual experts. This should lead to greater decentralization and more participation—and thus more accurate predictions on more varied topics. Technically, this is done with:
Today, prediction market creation is very centralized; the e.g. PredictIt team would decide which questions to add, often going for questions with wide appeal like “Who will win the 2024 Democratic Nomination?”. This draws more traders to participate, but the information gained isn’t as novel, actionable or useful.
Augur has tried allowing anyone to create a market with a complex system for reporting outcomes by votes from owners of their token. This implementation doesn’t obviously lead to the correct market resolutions. Voting on truth, in our view, does not accomplish the goal of true decentralization because a majority can always censor the minority. This problem—combined with Ethereum’s very high network fees—has essentially killed Augur.