Shower thought: “The more active a user on our site is, the less likely they are to spend money. This is the opposite of every other sustainable business model”.

User journeys we want to facilitate

• ❇️ A new user wants to choose “it’s gonna happen” or “no, it’s not”. Then choose how much they want to spend. Then make that trade at the current price.
  • Don’t want to think about probabilities, getting an optimal price, slippage etc.
• 🐳 Whale wants to throw a lot of money into a trade they are either very confident about or are emotionally invested in.
  • Should be able to do this without having to worry about getting a bad price/moving the probability.
• 🤑 Monetisation
  • Present users with irresistible deals to buy mana to fulfil limit orders
  • Create “house limit orders” to buy out the other side of a whale’s limit order instantly if they are purchasing mana to place the order.

Goals

• Improve simplicity and accessibility while maintaining current features for power users.
• Increase liquidity
• Integrate buying mana to be part of the same action as placing the trade.
• Increase demand and norm for active users to spend money.

What is bad right now?

• Complexity

  • Right now we make users think too much about how the probability moves etc. This is too complicated for the 90% of potential new users. Most people don’t think so quantitatively.

  • There are six numbers you have to consider right now.

    

  • It is such an intense UI with so many buttons and sliders. We are used to it now, but it’s very overwhelming.

• Liquidity
  • People who want to make big bets on certain markets can’t.
  • Eg. James’ user who said he wanted to drop $1k but realised there was no point bc he could just move all the markets to whatever % he thought was correct with a small amount.
  • The probability moving when placing a trade can be confusing for a new user.
• Buying Mana
  • The norm is to avoid buying mana and only do so because you want to donate it to charity. This is terrible.
  • The norm should be: Buy mana because you enjoy the product, information, and feel strongly enough about a trade or opportunity that you need capital to capture that value.
    • We sometimes actually see new users do this who aren’t familiar with the norm. But existing community members have that norm too ingrained into their minds and will possibly never buy mana.
  • The easiest path to getting large amounts of mana is currently from loans between users. We need to make the easiest path something controlled by Manifold which benefits us.
  • Humans respond more to the fear of missing out, than anything else. We need to create opportunities that they feel they simply must buy mana for or they are going to miss out on so much value.
    • Eg. Marcus on LK99 was trying to get as many loans as possible to not miss out on what he considered free money. Need to make this easier, but need to make the easiest route be beneficial to Manifold. That could be selling mana or charging a % for a loan.

Things to implement (very much wip, many thoughts in head not well thought out yet)

New trading UI, Bye AMM