A Prediction Market About the Past? Sure, Why Not!

关于“过去”的预测市场？当然，为什么不呢！

Would you put money on whether Covid-19 originated from a lab? How about whether some of the footage from the Apollo 11 moon landing was actually filmed on Earth? Verifact Markets, a new startup that bills itself as a “prediction market for disputed facts,” is betting that people will be eager to weigh in on questions like these. The company’s premise is so quirky it sounds like something a couple of philosophy and economics majors dreamed after too many bong rips in their dorm room: Instead of wagering on the future, why not trade on stuff that already happened?

你会拿钱去赌新冠病毒是否起源于实验室吗？或者赌阿波罗11号登月的部分镜头实际上是在地球上拍摄的？Verifact Markets 是一家自称为“争议事实预测市场”的新兴初创公司，他们押注人们会热衷于对这类问题发表看法。该公司的前提非常古怪，听起来就像几个哲学和经济学专业的学生在宿舍里抽多了大麻后想出来的点子：与其押注未来，为什么不交易已经发生过的事情呢？

When Verifact Markets launched on Friday, some of the initial topics traders could take a position on included whether Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide and whether insurance behemoth State Farm “intentionally delayed” claims related to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. The featured market during beta testing was, indeed, about the origins of Covid-19. (As of writing, the market is still open, with “true” priced at 76 cents and “false” at 32; the majority of participants had put money on the pandemic beginning at Wuhan Institute of Virology.)

当 Verifact Markets 周五上线时，交易者可以参与的首批议题包括杰弗里·爱泼斯坦（Jeffrey Epstein）是否死于自杀，以及保险巨头 State Farm 是否“故意拖延”了与2025年洛杉矶野火相关的理赔。在测试阶段，其主打市场确实是关于新冠病毒的起源。（截至撰稿时，该市场仍在开放中，“真”的价格为76美分，“假”为32美分；大多数参与者押注疫情始于武汉病毒研究所。）

Verifact Markets is being funded and incubated by Positron Capital Management, the family office of tech investor Peter Wokwicz. He envisions the startup as a way to settle debates over hot-button issues like the amount of energy consumed by AI data centers. “I’m excited, because nobody’s done this before,” Wokwicz says. “We’re not going to shy away from controversial markets.”

Verifact Markets 由科技投资者 Peter Wokwicz 的家族办公室 Positron Capital Management 提供资金并进行孵化。他将这家初创公司视为解决人工智能数据中心能耗等热门议题争议的一种方式。“我很兴奋，因为以前没人做过这件事，”Wokwicz 说，“我们不会回避有争议的市场。”

In a regular prediction market, participants buy financial instruments known as event contracts, which are pegged to whether a specific event will take place in the future. Topics range from which team will win the Super Bowl to what the price of bitcoin will be in 15 minutes to whether the US and Iran will reach a nuclear deal. Someone who buys a “yes” contract on Polymarket that the Bears will start Case Keenum next week will make money if that happens. Similarly, someone who bets “no” on Kalshi that it will rain in Miami tomorrow will lose money if there’s a downpour.

在常规的预测市场中，参与者购买被称为“事件合约”的金融工具，这些合约与未来是否会发生特定事件挂钩。议题范围从哪支球队将赢得超级碗，到15分钟后比特币的价格，再到美国和伊朗是否会达成核协议。如果有人在 Polymarket 上购买了“熊队下周将首发 Case Keenum”的“是”合约，一旦发生，他就能赚钱。同样，如果有人在 Kalshi 上押注“明天迈阿密不会下雨”，一旦下雨，他就会亏钱。

Each prediction market has its own rules about how it resolves events, and sometimes things can get messy, like when Polymarket bettors tussled over whether Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky actually wore a suit, or when Kalshi traders revolted over how the platform settled a market on whether Iran’s supreme leader would leave power.

每个预测市场都有自己解决事件的规则，有时情况会变得混乱，比如 Polymarket 的赌客曾就乌克兰领导人弗拉基米尔·泽连斯基是否真的穿了西装争论不休，或者 Kalshi 的交易者曾因平台如何结算“伊朗最高领袖是否会下台”的市场而发生抗议。

Verifact Markets’ setup is even messier. That’s by design, since the platform focuses specifically on scenarios where people disagree on what took place. It lists markets for past events that it considers “disputed” and lets its customers wager “true” or “false” on whether they really happened. People can also submit “evidence” for or against their position, and the company plans to offer rewards for credible documentation that helps resolve markets. If Verifact Markets determines that there’s enough evidence to make a call, it does so. If it still can’t tell, the company will “expire” a market and pay out users based on its calculation of the odds at the time.

Verifact Markets 的设置更加混乱。这是有意为之，因为该平台专门针对人们对已发生事件存在分歧的场景。它列出了被其视为“有争议”的过去事件市场，并让客户押注这些事件是否真的发生（“真”或“假”）。人们还可以提交支持或反对其立场的“证据”，公司计划为有助于解决市场争议的可靠文档提供奖励。如果 Verifact Markets 确定有足够的证据做出判断，它就会做出裁决。如果仍然无法判断，公司将使市场“过期”，并根据当时计算的赔率向用户支付款项。

According to Verifact Markets chief executive and cofounder Rodrigo Aquino, the markets themselves won’t determine whether something is true or false. That means even if all of the customers in a given market voted “true,” that won’t necessarily make it so. Trading prices will be factored in alongside other evidence and documentation that is submitted to the company by users. It is also planning to launch its own research system, which Aquino describes as “patent pending.” When I ask Aquino how the system works, he keeps the answer impressively vague: “We are analyzing, multi-dimensionally, a multitude of data points,” he says, noting that the process is “very mathematical, very quantitative” and also “very secretive.”

据 Verifact Markets 首席执行官兼联合创始人 Rodrigo Aquino 称，市场本身不会决定某事是真是假。这意味着即使给定市场中的所有客户都投票“真”，也不一定代表事实就是如此。交易价格将与用户提交给公司的其他证据和文档一起被纳入考量。该公司还计划推出自己的研究系统，Aquino 将其描述为“专利申请中”。当我问 Aquino 该系统如何运作时，他的回答令人印象深刻地模糊：“我们正在多维度地分析大量数据点，”他说，并指出这个过程“非常数学化、非常量化”，同时也“非常保密”。

When I point out that credibly determining how the Covid pandemic started would be a massive news story, resolving a mystery that has eluded scientists for years, Aquino remains upbeat. “It’s doable,” he says.

当我指出，可靠地确定新冠疫情是如何开始的将是一个重大的新闻事件，解决了一个困扰科学家多年的谜团时，Aquino 依然保持乐观。“这是可行的，”他说。

Verifact says that it is currently in talks with market makers about providing liquidity. Right now, the project is so small that it is being bootstrapped by Positron Capital Management. There are a number of ongoing lawsuits in the US over whether prediction markets should be considered financial instruments or gambling, but it’s hard to discern how Verifact would factor into that debate because of its rather odd business model.

Verifact 表示，目前正在与做市商商谈提供流动性的事宜。目前，该项目规模很小，由 Positron Capital Management 自筹资金启动。美国目前有多起关于预测市场应被视为金融工具还是赌博的诉讼，但由于 Verifact 的商业模式相当奇特，很难判断它将如何卷入这场辩论。

For the time being, the company is only offering its markets to people outside of the United States as it looks for the most viable legal path forward domestically, as it is not a licensed exchange in the US. But Wokwicz claims he purchased a regulated financial exchange in the last year and intends to roll Verifact into it when he can. Like Polymarket’s decentralized product, Verifact Markets is “on-chain,” and participants can make trades with stablecoins, a class of cryptocurrencies tied to the price of the US dollar and other fiat currencies.

目前，该公司仅向美国境外的人士提供市场服务，因为它正在寻找国内最可行的法律途径，毕竟它在美国并非持牌交易所。但 Wokwicz 声称他在去年购买了一个受监管的金融交易所，并打算在条件允许时将 Verifact 并入其中。与 Polymarket 的去中心化产品一样，Verifact Markets 是“链上”的，参与者可以使用稳定币进行交易，这是一种与美元或其他法定货币价格挂钩的加密货币。

Verifact Markets is part of a wave of startups interested in resolving the facts about disputed news and historical events. One of the most recent entries was the short-lived Peter Thiel–funded project Objection (later rebranded as The Primary), which aimed to determine whether specific media stories were accurate. But before the truth-adjudication stuff really got off the ground, The Primary pivoted to publishing news and a scoreboard for ranking journalists.

Verifact Markets 是致力于解决争议性新闻和历史事件事实真相的初创公司浪潮的一部分。最近的一个例子是 Peter Thiel 资助的短命项目 Objection（后来更名为 The Primary），该项目旨在确定特定媒体报道是否准确。但在真相裁决工作真正开展之前，The Primary 就转型为发布新闻和为记者排名的记分牌了。

For now, there are very few details about how Verifact Markets will ultimately determine whether something is true or false, even though its entire value proposition rests on the idea that it’s uniquely positioned to do so. It’s an extremely tall order, made even taller by all the other details that haven’t been worked out yet, like how the project will make money—it doesn’t plan to charge fees at launch. Wokwicz isn’t focused on that sort of thing, at least not yet. “What I’m looking forward to most is…”

目前，关于 Verifact Markets 将如何最终确定某事是真是假，细节非常少，尽管其整个价值主张都建立在它有独特能力做到这一点的基础上。这是一个极高的要求，而其他尚未解决的细节（例如项目如何赚钱——它计划在发布时不收取费用）使这一要求变得更加艰巨。Wokwicz 并不关注这类事情，至少现在还没有。“我最期待的是……”