Hey Manifolders!

We wanted to take the time to properly discuss everything that happened surrounding the whales vs minnows markets. A lot of this has already been communicated but we wanted to summarise our learnings and plans in one post.

Why did we refund Isaac?

Isaac spent $29,000 USD on WnM. We refunded $25,000, retaining $4,000 which is a comparable amount other users have lost in the past, to cover fees and act as a disincentive.

Ultimately, we wanted to ensure Isaac’s well-being. He has brought a lot of value to our site, and we appreciate his critical approach to providing honest thoughts and feedback about a product he loves. While our long-term monetisation will rely on whales making large purchases, we aren’t there yet and want to be responsible to ensure no one ever buys mana because they feel trapped. We don’t intend to refund going forward as we will work to prevent these events from repeating.

Trustworthyish Badge

Isaac will lose his Trustworthyish badge for controlling accounts by their API to farm hundreds of unique trader bonuses and transfer profit to his main account. Perhaps he can earn this back in the future.

Preventative measures

• Remove the ability to purchase more than $100 of mana at a time.
• Unlisting trending gambling markets.
  • We plan to actively unlist markets which aren’t predictive in nature (unless they are a stock). This includes markets such as “this will resolve to yes if higher than 50%”. We were already doing this to a small extent, but are going to be more strict going forward.
  • Unlisted markets won’t count towards leagues. We are also discussing removing unlisted markets from the all-time profit leaderboard.
  • Unlisted markets no longer give unique trader bonuses.
• Stricter rules on alts and market manipulation and general improvements to our guidelines (to come).
• Disallow Manifold staff from giving out mana loans.
• Ban on third-party real-money mana transactions.