Since then Polymarket has teased user created markets (check out the web archive here https://web.archive.org/web/20250404083503/https://polymarket.com/create). This no longer resolves but looks like it will initially be a mix of what Kalshi Ideas is and what Manifold AI generated markets does.
The rest of the conversation focused on Manifold, Kalshi and Metaculus. Below are the raw notes that I wrote in Apple Notes and used to guide the conversations along with callouts with various conversation points.
Even though ~late, I will be posting an overview of the event sometime soon. Either way hope these more unstructured notes are interesting.
Manifold
You guys already have a ton of ideas throughout your general musings section
Loans and the Financialization of Mana
I know that there were kinda recently some controversial things with loans on the platform built lean more into loans on the platform. As a play money market you guys can experiment with different financial primitives and see if they work for real money (eventually when you launch your platform). You already have a decent Mana economy being built with markets. Id actually like to see more stuff like the manifold financial complex.
In the same way that its easier for you guys to explore interesting financial concepts, I think you could implement parlays. Building a parlay system with Manifold being the house allowing any markets to be put together (within reason) would be a good way to earn Mana back. You already have a house loan system.
This lets you experiment with how its structured to later launch on your real money platform.
Real Money Market
Bring back sweepstakes and / or launch a separate manifold real money market. Although rather than having kinda whitelisted money markets allow anyone to pay a bond returnable on a certain amount of volume to list. pump.fun is doing roughly 700 token launches a day. Manifold is listing almost 100 markets a day but has was averaging 700 for a little bit. Pump did 700m in fees last year. You already have a concept of this with “boosting markets”. But this is slightly different. I am proposing you launch a real money market where you have similar markets to what you had on sweepstakes before whitelisted popular stuff. But then you let anyone on the play money platform to create a market and bond a certain amount of Mana to it. If that market hits a volume and unique trader threshold it “graduates” and get’s listed on the real money exchange. Your Mana bond is then returned.
Note that it seems like it is hard for Manifold to have a venture scale outcome / exit without real money markets. Potentially exploring other play money market concepts like clarity.markets is doing with alternative financial data could be a way.
I like this because it also makes Mana more “sacred”
Manifold is a launchpad for markets.
If you ever wanted to go a non-play money strategy again (and I think there is a lot to unpack here). Why not just “tokenize” Mana?
Real money user created markets poly going to have anyway
Manifold being a launchpad for markets I think is really strong branding and a good way for them to branch out from their already extremely active community.
Buying Information
Last year at manifest james had a talk on the future of prediction markets highlighting profit, buying information, hedging, matchmaking, and AI as the future. Profit is already there, hedging is less so without sweepstakes, manifold.love is rebooted, Buying information should be leaned into even more! I think theres a good set of audience that would happily pay say $5/10 about some more localized event like a e coli outbreak or something and get an email a few days later with decently forecasting market. I see this as a chrome extension that can be downloaded and on a given news article I can one click pay to create a market for it on manifold using the like AI builder. You can already like paste a article in your AI builder. I think theres a good amount of people that are not manifold users (never will be) but like consuming the markets for information
Once again Clarity is interesting here, using prediction markets for alternative data
Manifold news the Substack should be more embedded into your site, not sure how that might look
From your 2023 pivot doc “Since consumption of news is the biggest use-case on the site today, this could end up just being a redesign of the core platform”
I saw a note in there about Manifold Blogs? don’t remember that feature. I think stephen mentioned the possibility of a bluesky integration the other day I think this is a great idea
Adjacent recently launched a news API with over 10k sources semantically related to 100k+ markets across Polymarket, Kalshi, and Metaculus. Shoot me an email at `lucas@adj.news` if you are interested in trialing. We have already partnered with Polymarket Analytics to provide news.
Instrument Types
In various musings on numeric markets you mention building numeric in a similar way to Kalshi’s brackets. But note “this is a pretty bad experience if you want lots of buckets”… you are a play money platform you are meant to experiment with new financial structures!!
Others
Prior semi-pivoting article from 2023 you mention ideas around manifold sports, i think novig beat you to this and now its so clear books are moving to exchange models over the next few years
Alternative frontends is an interesting model, although even in crypto usually 1 frontend dominates (see liquity protocol)
Kalshi
Improve RFQ and Fees
Improve your RFQ platform and general fee structure. I think a lot of people don’t even know that you have this. Right now it seems like most of the coordination for using the RFQ platform is actually done off platform.
I reach out to a market maker or just someone in the discord we come up with a price and then go to Kalshi and settle it. Which is cool for a nice way to settle peer to peer bets
Which is a nice improvement over not having it but I except when I go to the RFQ tab for ANY market I can relatively quickly get a few quotes.
I think something else that is interesting to explore here is custom market quotes. Like I come to a market like the will there be a human to human transmission of bird flu this year and I actually want to trade on YES happening next month. I submit this for a custom quote via the RFQ etc.
It is nice that your currently pass through yield to cash and position holders, but I really think you need to work through your fee model. Rather than charging this like scaling fee based on the contract price which often results in multiple percentage points of fees, why not just charge like a flat 20bp fee or something?
I think this fits in with the custom RFQ quotes, but sometimes I might want to get exposure to a general event directionally but not want to make specific choices like on the expiry, exact amounts, etc.
Offer “Portfolios” - I want exposure to tariffs occurring throughout the year and being disruptive. you have a custom portfolio of 5-10 markets that can give me this over a timeframe. Some places call these like bundles and I suppose they can even be thought of like an index or basket.
Explore new instruments.
Fed fund rates should not be binaries instead they should look closer to calendar futures or perps. Bracket markets are worse than these other instruments liquidity is fragmented, harder to trade / margin, and harder to consume as information
Coinbase is launching what look like perps (5yr calendar futs with 2x daily settlement on hourly funding rate accrual)! We also have a market for perpetual future regulation on our Metaculus community here.
Lean into Ideas!
Competition is heating up here with Polymarket leading into creator markets and a similar “Idea” product!
Your Idea product is fantastic, I’ve yet to have a market I created actually get listed. Usually stuck in review. I get the sense it’s not really a priority for the platform. Eventually your listing team will need this!
Separate your sports platform from all the other markets. They are doing 70%+ of your average volume right now and put you in a weird spot of falling down the slippery slope of being a gambling platform!
Basically all prediction market platforms that have existed in crypto over the last decade have all pivoted into being a casino or a sportsbook after failing to find product market fit. I don’t want to see this happen with you!
This was likely the most controversial suggestion, I am still in the camp that it should be seperated but recognize that a lot of the sports flow ends up in non-sport markets as well
Metaculus
We ran out of time to discuss Metaculus but here are a few quick ideas
Communities
Lean into your communities product. You had the first mover advantage on having a “creator product” (whitelisted users building markets ie Polymarket). Communities highlighted in feeds
LLM Forecasting
Not an improvement but Metaculus is one of the few platforms that are really leaning into AI forecasting (others have various LLM partnerships for summaries, rules and resolution). I like this and think it’ll pay off
Indices
Continue to regularly put out indices. Metaculus is a news source and they are so much easier to consume!
Feel free to comment or message me with any thoughts and/or especially if you are looking to build a new exchange incorporating any of these!
