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Current Info Finance Models Are Anchored to Resolution
Prediction markets, decision markets, and research markets – such as MetaDAO’s governance models and Pump Science’s research prioritisation mechanisms – have been powerful tools for incentivising information discovery through financial primitives. But these mechanisms still rely on a form of finality.
For example, MetaDAO’s decision markets resolve to either implementing or rejecting a proposal. The outcome is binary. Pump Science’s research markets rely on an eventual experiment outcome to (in)validate claims. The decision to continue the experiment to next stages is binary.
But what about questions that never resolve? We believe that questions that never resolve represent a much larger amount of information in the world than questions that do resolve;
- Is China Based?
- How is the meaning of “intelligence” changing?
- What artistic movements are emerging as the most culturally significant today?
Prediction markets can only function insofar as they assume an eventual truth event – but many questions lack a clear truth benchmark. Even in the most liquid prediction market of all time – the 2024 US election on Polymarket – most of the trading activity was not a function of a binary resolution event, but rather a speculative process on social sentiment and the evolving legitimacy of different narratives.
Opinion Markets Elicit Information Without Resolution
Opinion Markets take the assumption that information finance can also work on markets without a resolution or a ground-truth. We extend the principles of info finance to a domain that prediction markets and decision markets cannot fully capture: the continuous pricing of social consensus.
Rather than constructing markets around what will resolve to be true, Based constructs markets around what the collective perception is at a moment in time, and how it is expected to evolve. The market itself is the oracle – it represents the best available aggregation of forward-looking sentiment.
Opinion markets leverage small tidbits of information spread across the world and build a mechanism for scalable and incentivised information ingestion. Our mechanism models information evolution around a few core pillars:
- Continuous: Opinion formation never stops
- Stochasticity: Opinions evolve with randomness
- Mean-reversion: Opinions tend to drift back toward equilibrium
- Drift: Certain events cause major opinion shifts, akin to Overton window shifts
- Acceleration & deceleration: The speed at which opinions are formed changes
These properties of information evolution allow Based’s opinion markets to function as real-time epistemic oracles – pricing collective perception as it evolves.
Opinion Markets Elicit Information About Anything
Unlike Vitalik, we do not believe AI is required to turbocharge info finance. Rather the contrary; we believe that the most valuable information is spread across the world, in people’s heads. Every individual holds unique insights, preferences, and beliefs that, when aggregated, form a powerful knowledge network – one that markets can surface organically, without requiring machine-driven interpretation.
Vitalik himself recognises that the reliance on AI is a factor of market structure problems; a symptom of fragmented, low-impact markets where sophisticated actors have little incentive to participate. But Opinion Markets do not require sophisticated actors, deep analysis or complex heuristics. Opinion Markets are instinctive, fluid, and frictionless. They require no research – only participation.
Based’s correct-by-construction opinion markets are able to elicit any information from just a single market participant with no upfront capital requirements from non-participants. Opinion markets can elicit information regarding “any” topic at a given point in time. They act as real-time pricing mechanisms for the attention economy, revealing which topics command the most perceived value. Furthermore, they provide objective and quantifiable information about the evolution of sentiment over time.
We believe in uncovering insights through decentralised knowledge, incentivised with a market mechanism built solely for this purpose. This way, we do not need to rely on AI to uncover “insights” about noisy people. We can provide higher signal, low-noise information produced by real people, in real-time, at scale.
Opinion Markets Complete the Info Finance Stack
Info finance is an attempt to turn markets into structured information engines. However, most implementations remain anchored to the assumption that truth must eventually resolve.
Opinion markets extend info finance into the non-resolving domain – creating a correct-by-construction mechanism for continuously pricing social reality itself.
This is not just an extension of info finance. It is its missing piece – the component that allows markets to function not just as predictive tools, but as epistemic oracles for the evolving structure of human consensus.