Kaspa developer targets ownerless prediction market by end-2026
Kaspa developer Manyfest has outlined plans for an ownerless prediction market on the network’s base layer, with tradable outcome tokens and a mainnet release targeted for the end of 2026.
- The proposed market would let anyone create contracts, trade outcome tokens, and participate in settlement.
- A lottery would reward holders of losing tokens who vote with the majority on outcomes.
- Manyfest has warned that smaller markets could be manipulated and participants could lose money.
Manyfest, identified as Sivan Helfer on Kaspa’s developer forum, said in a Nov. 11 X post that he has spent the past few months working with Bit Cat (@maxibitcat) to turn the proposal into an Argent application. He described a system with no owner or beneficiary, where only network miners would benefit from its operation.
Participants would be able to create and join markets while running their own application code, according to Helfer. His year-end release target remains a development plan, with the announcement describing work underway.
Kaspa prediction market would use tradable outcome tokens
In the implementation Helfer described, a prediction would be represented by a tradable, fungible KCC20 token with extra logic supporting voting. He said Argent has made it easier to code the covenant system as a series of states within Kaspa’s UTXO transaction model.
Although the idea could be written as a single Ethereum Virtual Machine program, Helfer said its state-based design felt natural to implement through UTXO covenants.
Separate development on Kaspa has used an EVM-compatible second layer. As crypto.news previously reported, Gate’s Kasplex Layer 2 integration enabled KAS transfers through the exchange in April. Kasplex’s documentation describes offchain execution, with Kaspa providing transaction ordering and data availability.
The prediction-market proposal sets out its own creation and trading process. In Bit Cat’s July 10 forum sketch, anyone could post a question and expiry date. Minting would create equal numbers of YES and NO tokens, backed by funds committed to the market, with trading available through compatible decentralized exchanges.
After expiry, token holders would vote during a defined window before holders on the winning side could claim payouts.
Lottery rewards would encourage losing holders to vote
The settlement mechanism grew out of a July discussion about how to encourage participants to report an outcome honestly when their financial position gives them a reason to dispute it.
Helfer initially asked whether a separate stake could reward honest voting and penalize answers outside the majority. Bit Cat favored rewards: losing tokens could enter a lottery, but only when their holders voted with the majority.
His July 11 reply proposed making voting necessary to receive any payout. Winning holders would have a reason to participate, while losing holders could still qualify for the lottery by reporting the result accepted by the majority.
Bit Cat acknowledged that the mechanism would not be immune to manipulation, saying he expected liquid markets with uncontroversial questions to be better suited to it.
An Aug. 27 revision changed the treatment of unclaimed winning rewards, proposing that they be burned instead of redistributed. Bit Cat said the amendment supported a more general result covering participants who hold both token types and vote differently with individual tokens.
His stated conditions included participation that is not too concentrated and a shared belief that the true outcome is slightly more likely to prevail.
Developers describe risk-management uses and limits
In a separate X post, Bit Cat described event-linked contracts as tools for managing risks, including a bar owner seeking protection against a lockdown or a winemaker concerned about an unusually hot summer.
“It’s fundamentally a protocol, a set of open rules,” he wrote, describing participants finding one another and agreeing on useful terms.
The forum proposal supports binary questions. In August, he clarified that an inflation contract could ask whether a particular CPI reading would exceed a threshold, while emphasizing that settlement questions should leave as little room for ambiguity as possible.
US regulators have addressed manipulation in event contracts through requirements placed on exchanges. A September warning on mention contracts covered outcomes tied to an individual’s speech, attendance or interactions. The CFTC’s Sept. 22 advisory reminded designated markets to list contracts that are not readily susceptible to manipulation.
Polymarket’s regulated US operations run through QCX, which the CFTC lists as a designated contract market. Its original designation dates to July 2025.
Helfer’s own warning focused on market size: smaller markets would be easier to manipulate under the current design. “Inevitably, people would lose money in this social experiment,” he wrote.
