Marcus has requested a short-term, six-figure loan so that their fund can complete a profitable deal with another crypto platform. If Manifund chooses to lend them a bunch of money, will we be repaid without incident?

About the loan

• Marcus also posted about this opportunity in the FB group "Highly Speculative EA Capital Accumulation":

• This is highly time-sensitive, which is why they're hitting up nontraditional sources like Manifund who can move quickly

• Manifund has previously issued a $300k loan to Lightcone, which was paid back promptly

  • That loan was collateralized against Oli's personal ETH; for this loan, Marcus is checking to see what kind of collateral they can offer.

  • The altruistic case for making this loan is much weaker (this would be to a for-profit org, albeit one that is for earning-to-give; while Lightcone is a nonprofit that we would have been reasonably happy to fund)

  • But the returns are better (1% per mo instead of per 2 mo)

• Reasons to do this:

  • I trust Marcus highly, based on his track record as a Manifund regrantor, his engagement with Manifold, and his presence in the EA community

  • $2.5-$4k of return for not that much work, would be nice

  • I like the idea of Manifund moving fast and doing offbeat things to help others in the community (see: previous loan to Lightcone)

• Reasons to maybe not do this:

  • It ties up our funds for a while

    • I think that Manifund operationally won't miss $400k of money loaned out for 1 month (>90%), though I need to spend ~30m checking how our funds are currently committed

  • It looks weird or crazy to potential future donors

  • It's actually very risky?

    • I heard a lot of warnings against making the Lightcone loan, and just because it worked out, doesn't mean it was a good idea

    • (At least this time I'm checking the prediction markets first!)

Resolution criteria

Roughly, the goal of this market is to capture "how likely are we to regret making this loan":

• Resolves YES if we're repaid at the end of 1 month

• Resolves YES if we mutually agree to extend the loan to 2 or 3 months, and are repaid on time for those

• Resolves YES if they end up eg handing over pledged collateral in place of a cash

• Resolves NO if they end up defaulting, or have to issue some kind of IOU to us that we're unsatisfied with

• Resolves N/A if the loan ends up not happening