As part of Manifund's operations, we've decided to issue a $300k loan to Lightcone Infrastructure!

This market resolves YES iff in 2 months time, Lightcone has fully repaid this with $303k received in Manifold for Charity's bank account. (I'd allow for ~week of payment processing, etc). Resolves NO if eg they default, or only repay partially, or get a loan extension.

Loan details

• 2 month term, 1% interest (~6.15% annualized), collateralized against Oli's personal funds

• Background: we had a call with Oli yesterday to discuss Lightspeed Grants & Manifund; one surprising thing was that Lightcone itself is immediately bottlenecked on cash for their Rose Garden Inn spending; and that other funders like OpenPhil have been slow to respond

• I'm excited for the structure of this as a loan (vs a grant) from Manifold for Charity. A 300k grant would have represented a significant chunk of our budget, but a loan is something we can make with much less analysis, esp given that we were possibly going to park our ~2.2m cash balance in a high yield treasury account anyways

• I didn't think very deeply wrt interest rate; originally offered interest-free, before realizing that we'd be losing out on baseline yield; 1% for 2 months felt roughly reasonable. The core motive was more "help out an org we think does great work" as opposed to "purely profit seeking".

  • Stephen informs me the market rate for a loan like this might be 15% annualized, in which case I'd view the difference between market rate and what we offered (~2.5% - 1% over 2 months on 300k = 4.5k) to be a donation to Lightcone

Conflict of interest notes: Manifold is discussing running a forecasting conference at Rose Garden Inn sometime around Sep 2023; we'd expect to pay for the use of the venue.