Stephen Grugett, James Grugett, and Austin Chen

Summary: Manifold Markets is building user-created prediction markets.

Background

In today’s hyper-polarized, low-trust environment, there is increasing demand for objective forecasts that are not driven by political or status quo bias. Prediction markets are one powerful, bottom-up alternative. A prediction market is a place where people can bet on the outcome of future events, and be directly compensated for correct predictions. Prediction markets can help society coordinate around complex issues by incentivizing more accurate forecasts, and serve as both a complement and an alternative to expert consensus.

Our proposal

Manifold Markets (https://manifold.markets) is building a forecasting platform centered around play-money prediction markets where users can create, participate in, and resolve their own markets.

We believe our user-created model differentiates us from previous prediction market attempts such as PredictIt, and in particular, makes for a completely frictionless experience, where anyone can create and share a market in seconds.

Several prominent political analysts have already created markets on our platform, including Samuel Hammond (https://manifold.markets/SamuelHammond, a former Mercatus Center researcher) and Richard Hanania (https://manifold.markets/RichardHanania).

We have also won a $20k grant from Scott Alexander, the blogger behind Astral Codex Ten (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results) and received a $2k bounty from the mathematician Paul Christiano (https://sideways-view.com/2019/10/27/prediction-markets-for-internet-points/).

If selected for this grant, we will use the funds to develop new features, grow our platform, and engage in community outreach. We are also looking to forward to working with and onboarding new prediction market creators from the Mercatus community.