A few weeks ago, we quietly dropped four strange-looking markets on the site with no resolution date and a leverage slider.
Some of you found them immediately. Some of you found them, and then found the bottom of the liquidity pool. Today we’re announcing for real: perpetual markets (perps) are on Manifold! We’ve already made an on-site announcement to soft-launch, so check that out if you’re interested in reading the previous discussion.
The short version: a perp tracks a real-world number directly — no resolution, no 0–100% (usually), no waiting six months to win 10 mana. You go long or short; you can use up to 100x leverage, and the crowded side pays the quiet side a funding rate every hour.
Funding rates change per market and over time, so pay attention to the fee info when opening a position and check in regularly if holding long term. Perps don’t impact leagues, yet.
The numbers were, uh, larger than we expected
We seeded the Bitcoin perp with around ~200k initially and figured we’d see how the first week went. That first week lasted roughly 11 hours. Within the first 48 hours, we were nearing 400M volume.
Day one: 18 million mana in volume, 1,122 trades
Day two: 364 million mana in volume, 7,358 trades
To date, ~300 of you have traded a perp, across ~10,000 positions. There have been ~50 liquidations.
That day-two number is genuinely cool, and it was the most informative start we could have hoped for. Most of that activity came from bots taking advantage of all of the market’s weaknesses — we had our early data, and it was clear what needed to change. By feasting on our tick delays with zero fees, ~100k was extracted almost immediately.
(That’s been fixed now, sorry to those of you who missed out on this little oversight!)
So, we shipped a 0.1% fee on opening a position. Specifically, a taker fee, so once limit orders land, you can sit on the passive side and pay nothing. We also raised max funding rates; the bitcoin perp went from 0.0114%/hr → 0.0228%. It seemed like we understood things, could model based on the last year, and reasonably expect that our pool would stabilize.
Just as I thought I could get a decent night’s sleep (lol, more below), Trump went on a crypto-pumping spree, which has landed us where we are: a 20% vertical presidential pump testing the limits of our new market type. The one thing Trump can’t seem to pump? His approval rating.
We’re keeping the 100x leverage for now, and we’ve instead targeted making perps more competitive for the average user and less of an all-you-can-eat buffet for bots. This means:
Fees now scale with sizing — this allows more people into the action. If you want to take up more of the house-backed pool, you need to pay a premium. This also works to prevent single users from taking huge positions during big jumps; the additional fee acts similarly to slippage if you were buying a large amount on an order book.
The rough formula is:
Fees for API trades are now a baseline 30bp (triple the default fee); the size scaling is applied on the default 10bp base, though, so it is functionally a 20bp additional fee for API trades.
Trade Web API Small (S ≈ 0) ~10bp ~30bp S = 50% of pool ~17.5bp ~37.5bp S = 100% of pool ~40bp ~60bp
If you want to see more perps, suggest them on the perps page. We’re most excited about the prospect of offering niche, unique, non-financial market perps. The most important element here is that there is a cheap (free) reliable data source.
I bit off more than I could chew when I decided to in-house the index for the OpenRouter market; please help us find cool datasources which make cool perps!
Easier streak-keeping
ICYMI: Tod is banned from sleeping
It’s not something we normally do, but with Claude these days, it was easy enough and felt right to refund lost streaks when, on one fateful while I was sleeping, the site went down. Remember to buy streak freezes so you don’t lose your streak!
There’s also a bug with streak timing that I haven’t quite solved yet, so it’s best to wait until we’re at least a few minutes into a new day before placing your next bet to ensure it counts for your streak timing.
Want a widget?
Speaking of streak maintenance, I’ve been using these in testing for nearly two whole months now, and I’m thrilled to share them with you: streak widgets for your home and lock screen (iOS / Android). APP UPDATE REQUIRED!!
Here’s a peek at some of the states:
To check if your app is up to date, open the streak modal by clicking the streak count icon. It should show something like this, plus a button to instantly add the widget to your home screen if you’re on Android.
Post a photo of the Manifold widget on your home/lock screen and give me a heads up, and I’ll send you some free mana as a bonus!
Money Money Money
Congratulations to our prize drawing winners, and our charity drawing winner!
Eliza’s pick won the charity giveaway: GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund!
GiveWell officially changed the name of this fund, and after confirming with Eliza, we donated the $1,100 to the “GiveWell Top Charities Fund”. We’ve renamed it on-site and added the “All Grants Fund” as a new charity for future drawings (now live!).
On the Prize Drawing front, 427.5k mana was burned, and we have our winners:
No purchase necessary to win or play; read the posted FAQ and Rules, not available everywhere. Prize drawing 31 is now live!
Changelog: A smoother, more reliable Manifold mobile app
We’ve improved sign-in reliability across Manifold’s iOS and Android apps, alongside several Android-specific fixes for identity verification and larger screens. This release focuses on mobile-app quality and does not change markets or trading.
Sign-in and account management
Fixed a sign-in loop that could send users back to the login screen after a successful sign-in.
Improved session restoration after reopening the app and on slower connections.
Made logout and account switching more reliable (but don’t forget our policy about alts!)
Prevented delayed session updates from restoring the previous or wrong account.
Added clearer messages for network failures, unavailable accounts, and conflicting sign-in methods.
Reduced misleading errors when a Google or Apple sign-in flow is cancelled.
Android improvements
Fixed identity verification so it can request camera access for ID and selfie capture.
Kept camera hardware optional, so compatible devices without a camera can still install the app.
Allowed Android tablets and foldables to rotate normally while keeping phones in portrait.
Updated the Android system-bar configuration to meet current edge-to-edge standards.
Final fix for a bug where Android notifications occasionally failed to navigate properly. If you encounter this bug again, try to remember the notification and report it.
Security and reliability
Restricted credential handoffs to successfully loaded Manifold pages.
Prevented stale sign-in requests, sessions, or tokens from affecting the current session experience.
Improved sign-in recovery when an in-app page takes longer than expected to load.
Added better diagnostics for authentication failures and login loops.
Under the hood
Android platform settings are now generated consistently during app builds, reducing the risk that camera, orientation, or display fixes are lost during a clean rebuild.
Join us in September!
The Overhang is a two-day conference on forecasting and its implications, September 19-20th in Washington, DC.
Inspired by Manifest, and run by the team who put on Manifest X DC last year, sessions for its 150 attendees will call on the community's playfulness, ambition, whimsy, and skill. The theme of this weekend is Forecasting, broadly construed, whether that’s prediction markets, calibration, your own personal growth, or just talking about exciting new problems we’ll solve in the world to come.
Sign up at: theoverhang.ai
Happy forecasting!