Picture credit: Gavriel Kleinwaks. Not pictured: Sinclair, who caught COVID... 😷
Welcome to Above The Fold, Bahamas edition! The Manifold team has been hard at work from the FTX Fellowship EA offices, courtesy of FTX. With our Bahamas buff we have been able to pump out several new features including profile comments and faster searching!
Thanks to Ian, users can now see their own or others’ comments on their profile pages! This is a positive step towards our goal of fostering vibrant discussion and a community that rivals those of other social media websites.
Explore is 10x faster, thanks to Algolia
We will be the first to admit some of the pages on our website used to be sooo sloooow. Thanks to James’s hard work over this past week, our loading speeds have been improved drastically with the implementation of Algolia.
“It was extremely difficult... the worst ever,” he stated at our stand-up before proceeding to explain details the rest of us definitely understood! Part of this change also includes adding an extra filter category, so there are now separate sort and filter options.
EA Bahamas Hackathon
Manifold hosted a hackathon here at the Bahamas offices! Our EA friends from Nonlinear and QURI participated and demoed some of the awesome new systems they have been working on.
However, the winning project came from our very own James and Stephen, who created a new type of market for numerical ranges.
“[It] uses DPM across 100 discrete buckets. The market starts at a uniform probability. You input your point estimate and a bet amount, and we create a normal distribution centered around your bet, and place the appropriate bet in each bucket after doing some normalization.” — Stephen
You can bet on whether numerical ranges will be added to our website or not here.
Introducing our newest team members 📈
We’ve had 4 new hires officially start working for Manifold Markets since our last letter that we are thrilled to share: David as community manager, Marshall and Sinclair as developers, and Alice as executive assistant.
We are still looking to add a Head of Growth, a Full-Stack Developer, and a UI/UX Designer to our team, so if you are interested (or know anyone who might be) please see more details here: bit.ly/manifold-jobs. Feel free to get in touch at jobs@manifold.markets or arrange a call with Austin.
Shoutout to our latest investors
We’d like to give a big thank you to our two newest investors, who contributed $420k at a $22M post-money cap 🌿
With this new investment, we’re looking forward to partying even more lavishly in the Bahamas growing our team and funding initiatives like Manifold for Good. Thanks again for making our work on Manifold possible!
Links
Next week, Manifold is likely to make all bets public by default, including bets made in the past; see the context and opt out here.
Please fill out this 5 minute survey that will help us improve the platform. Participants will receive M$500, deposited directly to their accounts!
I don’t think accuracy is the killer app. The killer apps are trust, aggregation, and clarity. [...]
Prediction markets aren’t competing with Nate Silver or spy satellites, any more than the stock market is competing with investment banks and market analysts. Prediction markets are competing with newspapers, pundits, and government departments. They’re a source of dis-intermediated information, short-circuiting everyone who sets themselves up as authoritative intermediators. A prediction market future is one where disinformation, propaganda, and narrative construction - while not impossible - are constrained by everyone having access to the same facts, through a medium impossible for any single bad actor to influence.
Stephen published an article on Manifold’s automated market maker: Maniswap
Suppose you want to want to initialize the probability at p. Instead of the simple constant-product formula, use:
With the corresponding market probability of
This will allow you to allocate all 100 YES and 100 NO shares of your original $100 subsidy at any probability you choose!
Thanks for reading! We look forward to seeing your inquisitive minds on Manifold as we wouldn’t be here without all of your investments, questions, comments, and bets! We already have a bunch of new features lined up to be released over the upcoming week, so keep an eye peeled!
