Focusing on Mana, Bringing Sweepstakes to an End

Major site update, redeem your sweepstakes by March 28th

TL;DR: We’re shutting down sweepstakes to make the mana experience better than ever. Make sure to redeem any sweepcash by March 28th.

If you enjoy our Substack, you’ll be excited to know that part of our change in focus will include an increase in newsletters and similar content output!

Why?

While we've enjoyed using sweepstakes and know many of you have as well, they unfortunately haven't met our usage goals. We're sorry to see them go, but we've realized they've been drawing focus away from building out the core platform you know and love. We want to double-down on the user-created markets that make Manifold unique and think returning to our previous pure play money model is the best way to do it.

What happens now?

• No new sweepstakes markets.

• New sweepcash issuance from purchases, signups, and streaks will be halted immediately.

• Markets that close on or before March 3rd will continue as before and will resolve in a normal fashion.

• Markets that close after March 3rd have been resolved to the current market probability.

  • Though we'd prefer to let trading continue until March 3rd, resolving to the current market probability at a known future date could enable market manipulation. Resolving these markets now ensures a fair and orderly shutdown that honors everyone's trading history.

• Users are welcome to cashout or donate their entire sweepcash balance, regardless of whether it has been won in a sweepstakes or not (for amounts above our minimum threshold of $25).

• Users will have until March 28th to make a final cashout or donation. After this date, all non-cashed out sweepcash will be automatically converted to mana at the rate of 100 mana : 1 sweepcash.

What do you all have cooking?

We’re doubling down on everything that has made Manifold great so far: user-created markets, play money, nerd-friendly content, and an ethos that combines fun and spontaneity with serious forecasting power. We believe the original vision of Manifold can take us much farther.

As a business, we’ve often spurned opportunities to provide more value to our current audience in favor of moonshots to scale to new audiences. We now think that’s counterproductive and that following our own unique vision is the best long-term path to usage and growth.

Here are some of the new initiatives on our roadmap we’re excited about:

• Becoming the world’s best AI forecasting and discussion platform

  • We already have a large chunk of all researchers at top AI labs on our platform

  • With a bit more curation (and numeric markets), we can be the default venue for AI discussion

• Numeric & Date markets: the right way

• Better AI tooling for market creation & resolution

• Boosts: the right way

• Sponsored tournaments on AI, economics, and more

Join us and let’s Make Manifold Fun Again!