Manafold Markets is out of mana 🤭

Austin Chen1 Apr 2022 22:07 UTC
36 points
2 comments1 min readLW link

Crossposted from Above The Fold.

The problem

As you may know, we’ve been busy raising our seed round in the last couple of weeks. One piece of feedback we often hear from investors is to be careful with how we issue our M$ (aka mana). We conducted an internal audit, which revealed that… Manafold Markets is out of mana!!

We did some brainstorming on how to address this unexpected shortfall. Some ideas:

  • Charge new users to join Manafold instead of handing out M$ 1,000

  • Institute demurrage, a negative interest rate on unspent mana

  • Start an OnlyFans and post exclusive photos of our mascot, Foldy McFoldface

The solution

In the end, we decided to go after one source of nearly limitless mana: tax the rich traders who sit atop our leaderboards!

We were inspired by Radical Markets to set up a Harberger Tax. This means that all our leaderboard slots are now for sale. Instead of trying to make good predictions in our markets in the hopes of turning a profit, you can just buy that leaderboard position you’ve always wanted! Check it out:

How this works

  1. Every leaderboard slot has an “assessed value”: what the current holder thinks their slot is worth.

  2. Slot holders pay a continuous fee of 25% per hour to Manafold.

  3. At any time, you can pay the assessed value of a slot to buy it from the current holder.

  4. The slot is now yours! You can customize the message, or reassess it to a new value.

Try it out now, at https://​​manafold.markets/​​leaderboards!

Where did Manafold’s mana go?

Honestly, we’re as puzzled as you are. Leading theories include:

  • Leaky abstractions in our manabase

  • One too many floating-point rounding errors

  • Our newest user Robert’);DROP TABLE Balances;--

We’d be happy to pay a bounty to anyone who can help us solve this riddle! Preferably in USD, as we have a lot more of that now than mana.

In other news

It’s been quite a busy day on the internet; who could have predicted all these announcements?

Austin Chen1 Apr 2022 22:07 UTC
36 points
2 comments1 min readLW link