Zeitgeist - A Prediction Markets protocol helping steer humanity towards truth and progress

Hello wonderful community,

I am Harald (sea212), Lead Blockchain Engineer at Forecasting Technologies (formerly Zeitgeist)

Zeitgeist is currently a parachain on Kusama. One of the major goals is to provide a platform that can serve anybody to find the most likely outcome of future events by aggregating information from the crowds. This concept is called Prediction Markets. Anyone can create a prediction market for a specific topic and everyone can purchase or sell outcome tokens in that market, effectively signalling the market what they believe should be the right outcome. Everyone is highly encouraged to make an informed guess, because good predictions are incentivized and bad predictions are punished by using a base currency within the market.
This is just a part of the big picture. In a later iteration the Prediction Markets functionality will be used as a basis for a novel governance algorithm that is called Futarchy. Futarchy utilizes Prediction Markets to help find the best decisions given a specific problem. This is achieved by coupling potential decision paths that can be taken with predictions about the change of a metric (or a set of metrics) that is used to evaluate the effectiveness of a decision path in respect to specific goals. In a nutshell, the wisdom of the crowds (or if desired, a selected group of experts) is utilized to find the most promising decision paths for a collective such as a DAO. Futarchy will be made available to other consensus systems via XCM, such that other consensus systems can utilize it as a governance mechanism.
In its current state, Zeitgeist offers a fully functional Prediction Markets application with options to create markets, provide liquidity to those markets, trade the outcomes, dispute the outcomes by using several dispute mechanisms and finally to distribute the rewards based on the quality of prediction for each participant.
At the heart of the Zeitgeist protocol lies the Automated Market Maker (AMM). We have two of those. One uses the Constant Product Market Maker (CPMM) scoring rule implementation also used in the balancer pool implementation, although slightly adjusted to avoid arbitrage opportunities, which are undesired in prediction markets because they just draw funds from liquidity providers. The other one is called Rikiddo, it’s one that we developed and it is an extension of the LS-LMSR scoring rule. LS-LMSR was specifically designed for the Prediction Market use-case, so is Rikiddo.

We at Zeitgeist are colorful team distributed along the whole world. We have a well rounded team with plenty of different perspectives and skill sets on the project. Everyone has a lot of positive energy to offer and is highly motivated and hyped about the project. It can be hard at times to work at the cutting edge and extending the borders of uncertainty, but just as hard as it can be, it also offers a lot of excitement, fun and fulfillment.
We are very glad to be able to build in the Polkadot ecosystem and have already had contact with plenty of teams. We experienced great positivity across the different projects in the Polkadot ecosystem and the strong drive to move together to build something great. We share that perspective and energy and it feels great to be part of that. We are looking forward to move along together, through good and bad times, to build something unique, exciting and necessary together. Shout out to every other team in the ecosystem, let’s buidl together!

Thanks for taking your time to read through all of this. We would be happy to welcome you in our Discord server.

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