“If this, then that” for the future
It’s never been easier to make a bet online with crypto but it remains difficult to compose your own.
As an example, take the one million dollar bitcoin bet made last year by the technologist and investor Balaji Srinivasan. Despite this being a bet about crypto, and Balaji seeking a way to do this bet onchain, the bet was created the old fashioned way. It was a gentlemen’s bet, and resolved socially when Balaji sent 1.5 million worth of Bitcoin out a few months later.
There’s nothing wrong with a bet enforced socially! There is though, something special about a bet that can automatically resolve. One where all parties put their wager up first and the stakes are transparent for all to see. If Balaji’s bet already captured attention as a social bet, how much attention could new bets generate when there’s no question about skin in the game?
And if you could do a bet between two people, what other kind of bets could you do? And where else could you explore?
An open way to compose the future
One frame to think about what to build here comes from an app called IFTTT (If this, then that). In IFTTT you choose a trigger and then an action, or series of actions to follow after. I can choose a trigger like getting a new follower on Twitter, and then connect it to the Hue lights in my apartment to automatically trigger a light show.
Imagine what this flow could look like when you can trust an onchain oracle as the trigger, then can make any onchain action happen after that.
The kind of composability you can get here is wild.
“If this, then that” for the future - Potential Use Cases
New formats for predicting the future
Roulette style prediction markets
Determine a payout based on how close people get to the exact date it happens in the future.
Large scale, one on one bets
Balaji’s million dollar bitcoin bet
High stakes matches over games of Chess or Fortnite (where each party puts up an NFT wager)
A new way to launch meme tokens
Novel ways to engage communities
Reward community members for helping the community achieve a goal
Polymarket style prediction markets where you can direct the pooled fees to wherever you like
Performance Based Bounties
Decentralized XPRIZE
Better altruism
funds automatically transfer when specific goals are triggered
Binance is to Uniswap as Polymarket is to ________
It’s hard for those new to crypto to understand this but there was an era in crypto, where Uniswap didn’t exist, and in order for your coin to have a chance, you had to get a major exchange to list it for you. We’re currently someplace similar with prediction markets.
Polymarket, which has done nearly a billion dollars in volume the past few months, is doing great but they are curating everything in a way similar to Binance. What could a prediction market look like that was more like Uniswap? One that’s open with Ethereum values built in?
Next steps for an “If this, then that” prediction market
It’s possible to hack all of the above use cases together with smart contracts and onchain oracles. At the moment though, it’s a mess. It’s difficult to connect oracles (like uma.xyz) and deploy the contracts in a way that just works for a user attempting to create a market. There are also plenty of UX and social challenges to making these markets legible and compelling to regular people on the internet.
Before we jump into creating a general product that allows anyone to compose their own market, we’re rolling out some experiments.
To join our first one, follow our Telegram channel. We will go live soon.
And if you like what we’re working on and want to support, mint the image of this post above on Zora. It’s up for the next 24 hours.
As always, DMs open.