I am consciously trying engineer my own annus mirabilis. Not for this year but actually for the year starting 25 and ending 26. It will mark 10 years since I left home to work on my first startup. I have grown unbelievable amounts since that fateful year. I am some intuition about what my magnum opus will be but I need to prepare the soil^[1] so that it may take.
September 23rd is my 24th birthday. 1 year that is the amount of time I shall give my self to make the conditions for my magnum opus. I shall begin the year with a bang by launching Manifestation Markets.
Technologists are somewhat the anti astrologers in the sense that they often give the advice that your launch doesn’t matter as no one will remember it. The circumstances of your birth mean nothing, the promise of a just world.
In the coming week I shall begin this process by releasing Sepolia.manifestation.market. A place that mirrors the beta launch of manifestation.market, you will be able to make test manifestation markets, place sepoliaETH bets, and see how they will resolve along with receiving sepoliaETH rewards.
The circumstances of my birth and the calendar make my birthday an especially auspicious time. It often falls on the equinox, and is exactly 100 days before the end of the year. On my birthday the platform will launch in the form of an inaugural market, which will be one to fund the next 6 months of development (7.5Eth, ~$30K). This market will have a closing date of new years 2026.
Now back to your regularly scheduled update.
There is only one real competitor in the sector that Manifestation Markets is targeting that being MetaDAO. MetaDAO is a worthy competitor with: amazing capitalization, and some of the biggest names in the space being associated. But I think it’s solving a slightly different and wrong problem.
That problem being governance and enforceable fiduciary responsibility for internet capital market companies. This is worthy and hairy problem to solve, but not the one I’m trying to solve.
In particular MetaDAO is betting (rightly I hope) that futarchy can be a good governance mechanism for certain type of DAOs. I’m not as sure whether token price will work for promoting the best governance in all cases, this is due to a somewhat arcane argument surrounding the nature of theta decay and learning signals. But, crypto isn’t at a point where it makes sense to be arguing about whether or not something is the best way to do a thing. MetaDAO is a credibility signal against rugs not one for saying I’m a good project.
I’m hoping to create a signal that is about the quality of a project’s central premises not it’s governance. The equivalent to a Tier-1 seed investor, something that let’s you know that this idea has been through the most intense scrutiny community could muster.
To do this novel game theory needed to be created to bring the meta of shorting, and more importantly short reports to the pre-liquid internet financial system.
The novel mechanism blends aspects of Dominant Assurance Contracts, and Prediction Markets into something entirely new.
Prediction Markets on the other hand are essentially Zero Sum Games where in the upside of the bets comes directly from the other side of the bet. But through their game theory everyone contributes information to the market meaning that from their chaos truth is revealed.
Manifestation Markets takes advantage of a weird asymmetry which is not all investors are equally concerned about downside. In particular early stage investors are less downside sensitive than many other types of investors.
Because of this the value proposition is actually structured to be quite different for the respective sides. For the side who believes in the project the value proposition is that of cheaper equity, funded by the doubter side of the bet. Increasing the leverage and therefore multiple on the upside of their investment. Given Venture math this can be the difference between a fund returning winner and a average investment.
For the doubter side, the value proposition is the promise of asymmetric risk and reward. This side is less concerned about size of upside but more about the relative ratio of risk/potential upside. They’re more akin to sports betting arbitrageurs, looking for unreasonably priced bets. This keeps the platform dynamic and efficient.
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[1]: an earlier draft of this sentence had this as lay the groundwork, and upon editing I realized for the first time the origin of that phrase