Welcome to OddChain.
On the frontier of tech, this is the only chart that matters:
Put differently, OddChain is launching into a milieu in which most anything and everything that previously captivated investors, developers, and dreamers is currently sputtering or drowned.
A few examples:
a little over a week ago, cryptocurrency markets experienced a blinding flash crash that -- among other instantiations of raw violence and brutality -- briefly sent a multi-billion dollar asset to zero;
Karpathy and Sutton just threw an unusually heavy wet blanket on AI optimism, firmly re-aligning us on the Kurzweil timeline; and
Bryan Johnson continues to tweet about the intimate secrets of his johnson and, alas, not the key to eternal life. He’ll sell you a vitamin though!
Let’s put it out there again so it can’t be missed. This is the only chart that matters:
Chart reading is often more art than science, so here’s our literary interpretation:
…by eclipsing $2b notional volume per week, prediction markets and futarchy are definitively establishing themselves as a viable and emergent technological vertical in their own right.
No doubt crypto will eventually bounce back, cockroaching its way to ever-greater relevance as always.
Longevity research will stumble backwards into a more exciting breakthrough than earning marginal benefits from boofing oysters or whatever.
And even if AI development has stalled, the current state of the art will continue to be integrated into contemporary workstreams in surprising and force-multiplicitive ways.
But this week -- the week of OddChain’s launch -- prediction markets have firmly and definitively decoupled from the wider tech trends, and may be the only thing worth paying attention to for the next few quarters at minimum. After all, what other technology lets you scry the future?
Why now?
Formerly only able to snatch a trickle of liquidity and attention for two weeks every four years during the peak of presidential election cycles, prediction markets are having a breakout moment amid a broader rise in gambling. Meanwhile, a kiss deeper in the weeds, futarchy experiments like MetaDAO are beginning to gain steam as an alternative form of capital formation. Even gambling sites are using prediction markets to hedge their own platforms!
Liquidity and attention act as a uniquely virtuous flywheel. When the news pays attention, users pay attention, market makers pay attention, and the next thing you know you’ve signed a check with the Intercontinental Exchange -- big-time liquidity, which will no doubt bring in more attention…
Perhaps more importantly than rote users and LPs and headlines, however, is the Cambrian explosion of developer activity taking place around these markets. A dizzying array of tooling, professionalized trading suites, derivatives, and novel (read: fucking bonkers) mechanisms. This interest from sophisticated builders is of course juxtaposed with the actual users, who remain largely unsophisticated traders having a very good time and generally making money.
We’ve seen this before, and that’s exciting. Put simply: in their current state, prediction markets represent the single highest-upside moneymaking and developmental ecosystem since the ‘DeFi Summer’ of 2020. Anyone with any degree of onchain-analytical, data science, coding, or even theorycrafting skill has a wildly asymmetric opportunity to make money and/or a career.
Why be anywhere else?
Who are we and what are we doing?
OddChain is founded by three writers who live in DC (hit us up, we’ll buy you a drink). One is a finance lawyer who formerly worked on Capitol Hill; one is a crypto industry veteran; one is a former film executive and current comms professional.
We’ll be writing things we think are useful as well as about whatever interests us, attempting to chronicle the prediction market mainstream breakthrough and the subsequent ways in which the technology will fundamentally alter our collective apprehension of reality -- transforming news, gambling, policy, polling, and all forms of decision making writ large.
Also, we’ll be staying anon for now because we want to keep our day jobs.
Let’s have fun, let’s make a little money.
