Financial Complex Stumbled & Nuked

The Saga of the Tumbles Financial Complex on Manifold Markets

by Ender Ting

Setting: the Northern Reaches

Is it a coincidence that now the two most dramatic escapades in Manifold’s history have involved members of the Canadian contingency of the site’s userbase?

Perhaps the highest stakes market on Manifold this year was “Who will be the prime minister of Canada after the next election?” It accumulated over a thousand traders, the total trading volume exceeded 5 million mana (purchasable for $42,000 USD, for a sense of scale), and the potential for controversy scaled accordingly. By the beginning of May, 2025, after the Canadian voters had handed the Liberal party a mandate to form a government, and Carney was all-but-formally the prime minister, the market settled at 99% odds for Carney.

Traders requested the market creator, Peter Njeim, to resolve the market already. However, he demurred, clarifying that he would resolve upon the validation of the election results in a few days.

He consistently emphasized this position and blocked users requesting an early resolution from the comments section, exercising the historical Manifold creator’s right to autonomy.

“We believe users should have autonomy over their own markets as much as possible. Our philosophy is to keep moderation to a minimum and empower users with tools to control the content that they want to see.”

-Opening statement of the Manifold Community Guidelines

Everything looked fine, except perhaps for those with massive, long positions on Pierre Poilievre, the losing candidate in the Canadian PM election. In a few days, it would not be fine at all.

Tumbles Set-Up

"A little debt shall turn to gold,
For truths are known, and markets told.”
But fortune’s wind blew cold and wrong,
And Tumbles’ debts grew loud and long.

To pay the first, he begged a next,
Each time more gold, each term more vexed.
He climbed a stair of empty air,
Built tall with dreams and gambler’s prayer.”

(Henry in a comment on Manifold)

Prominent Manifold super-user, Tumbles, had been forecasting on the site since late 2022, across many platform changes. Back in December 2023, he had a strong feeling that the mana economy could not allow the prediction of near-certain and near-impossible events:

To have more mana for pushing markets, he took out both the official Manifold platform loans, as well as a litany of inter-user loans. This began so long ago in Manifold history that the user interface fails to show the transactions, but the traces can still be found via API. These historical artifacts indicate that Tumbles had already had some loaned mana due for repayment by March 2024 and perhaps even farther back.

Eventually, these loans formed the basis of the Tumbles Financial Complex - a scheme for betting select markets to near certainty (most recently concentrating on various election outcomes), borrowing sums of mana on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands, mostly from whales who had mana idling in their coffers. Tumbles had a substantial position in the Canada PM market too, from when it looked like Poilievre was a sure bet to win back parliament for the Conservatives.

The financial complex had previously courted with absolute bankruptcy by taking out large positions in Biden remaining the Democratic nominee in 2024 (which looked like a sure bet for a brief period, but failed to go according to plan if you recall). A bailout loan from the central banking authority of Manifold managed to revive the entity back from the brink, and loans promptly resumed.

As Discord-using Manifolders will recall, the financial scheme required the assumption of riskier and riskier propositions:

So would the Canadian PM market save Tumbles Financial Complex from insolvency?

Market Misresolution

On May 4, 2025, the market creator, Peter Njeim, decided to embroil himself in these shenanigans. He swapped human-readable labels for the two options "Pierre Poilievre" and "Mark Carney"; the shares were still attached to their original, unique outcome identifiers so that traders who bought NO on the former could see "NO | Mark Carney" in their portfolios which was not in fact how they had traded! Almost immediately after swapping the labels, Njeim resolved the market to the outcome originally representing Pierre Poilievre, but which now displayed the label "Mark Carney.”

This kind of resolution meant that traders who chose the correct answer did not get their payouts. Then, who did?

Well, Tumbles had bet about 106k mana on YES for Pierre Poilievre, plus some 444k mana on NO against Mark Carney, so in total he stood to win about 2.5 million mana!

Tumbles saw a big increase in his balance and, acting quickly after the coordinated misresolution, began to repay each and every loan, even those expiring in 2026! To prevent the re-resolution of the market from removing the mana from his treasury, he moved 2.5 million mana to his cat assistant, Orangey, who promptly repaid Tumbles' loans. Nothing stopped the payout, not even the re-resolution of the Canada PM market which sent the balance of the Tumbles’ main account into deeply negative territory.

Rapid Reversal

The Manifold community detected a certain discrepancy with outcome labelling in fifteen minutes - a remarkable speed considering a large part of community is US-based, for whom it was nighttime.

The top option was updated to a slur instead of real candidate name; that also got into resolution notification and emails for all the market traders, over a thousand people. In a matter of minutes, the required changes - or, more appropriately, blocks - were done by a moderator.

13:00 UTC, Joshua: "aaaaaaa"

13:02 UTC, Joshua: "I, uh, banned him?"

Meanwhile, Tumbles publicly asserted that he had repaid all loans and owed nothing to Manifold users, resolving his own market on that question:

As an aside, that market resolving NO triggered a temporary ban for Tumbles to take out any Manifold loans for next three months. Not that it matters much for a banned user but still:

“Tumbles may choose to resolve this market NO if they don't owe any mana to other users. Once they do so, they will be prohibited from taking on any new loans for three months.”

As a matter of balancing out the economy, “Manifold SEC” sprung into action. The loan repayments made by Orangey using the 2.5 million derived from the manipulated market were clawed back before the mana could begin to spread throughout the economy.

Reclaiming mana produced sharp peaks on net-worth and balance graphs for users who had recently lent Tumbles mana. Perhaps they will one day be called “Orangey Spikes” in honor of his innocent cat assistant?

Also, the Canadian PM market was then re-resolved correctly, with Peter Njeim finally getting banned, as you might expect.

Overall, the Tumbles Financial Complex has been nuked, eliminating a mana “source” Manifold had for over a year, potentially making a few select election markets less liquid and more directionally accurate. Tumbles was left with a huge negative mana balance and outstanding, clearly (right?) unpayable debts to his original lenders. Manifold's integrity test passed, with the relevant markets resolved in accordance with real events.

Rebukes and Postscripts

Black Crusade / Yay the free market! Freedom of money movement that is.

Peter Njeim / No Thing Can Be Wrong If Done For Good Reasons

Peter Njeim / We will escalate while your resolution stands

Tumbles / I solemnly swear I won that mana!

This misresolution escalated into a multi-minute saga, testing both the agility of Manifold’s moderators and the attentiveness of its community. The drama still continues with lower stakes.

Tumbles has transferred ownership of the loans to another user, who is slowly negotiating with creditors to try to restructure and wipe clean the debt, causing the “Will Tumbles be late to pay back a loan” market to remain at a curious 80%.

More complicated schemes at restructuring the debt seemed to be gaining momentum behind the scenes:

If you’re a big-time journalist interested in covering this financial scandal, please reach out… there’s mana on the line, of course!

Happy Forecasting!

-Ender Ting for Above the Fold