Retro funding redesign: prediction markets cut reviewer load by only judging challenged projects
devanshmehta · x · 2026-10-31
devanshmehta sketches a prediction-market redesign for retro funding programs, arguing we'll look back with horror at zcash tokenvoters reviewing 37 applications or Optimism badgeholders voting on 500 projects.
Mechanism: markets give odds on whether voters would approve a project; projects are selected by odds; a challenge period lets the community contest off results; only challenged projects go to expensive human resolution.
Problems solved: duplication of labor (sortition committee reviews only challenges), width-over-depth tradeoff (reviewers go deeper on fewer items), and high overhead of expert time.
Risks: projects can bid up their own odds; countermeasures include auto-challenging suspicious trading (cheaters forfeit funds) and AI bots that trade down artificial pumps. The attached image invokes Robin Hanson's "info finance" idea: distill a costly, trusted human-judgment mechanism into a cheap prediction market, invoking the real mechanism only 0.01% of the time. @seerpm has built the smart contracts and bot ecosystem and is seeking pilots.
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