We’re excited to announce our first Prize Drawing on Manifold. We’re giving away $1,000 in USDC!
What are Prize Drawings?
Prize Drawings are periodic, opt-in drawings where eligible users can enter for a chance to win real cash prizes paid in USDC. It’s similar in spirit and functionality to the Charity Giveaway, but instead of donating to charity, winners get paid out directly in USDC.
You can see the current drawing and details at: https://manifold.markets/prize
Who can participate?
To enter, you must:
Be 18+
Have at least M1,000 invested (to keep this for active predictors)
Use one account per person
Be in an eligible location (some states / countries are restricted due to local laws)
Not be a Manifold employee (and related restrictions)
All eligible users can participate for free with a free entry.
If you’re in a restricted location, you can still use Manifold as normal — you just won’t be able to access or participate in Prize Drawings.
Important related changes
Prize Drawings come with a couple of platform changes aimed at compliance and reducing abuse/spam:
1) Mana purchases are moving to crypto
Going forward, mana purchases will be crypto-only. Pay using any major cryptocurrency from your wallet or link directly to your Coinbase or Binance account.
If you don’t already own crypto, you can purchase via Coinbase or platforms like MoonPay (which support credit card).
To make the first-time switch easier, we’re also adding a first crypto purchase bonus of 10% for any amount, and a further 10% for purchases over $1,000 USDC.
2) New signups will have ID verification
New accounts will be prompted to verify identity (mobile + ID + selfie).
Existing users are largely grandfathered in. If you don’t want to participate in Prize Drawings, you generally won’t need to do anything new.
FAQ + Official Rules
We’ll keep the Prize Drawing FAQ up to date (including eligibility and restricted locations), and the Official Rules govern if there’s any conflict.
Prize page: https://manifold.markets/prize
FAQ page: https://docs.manifold.markets/prize-faq
Official Rules: https://docs.manifold.markets/prize-rules
Feedback welcome
We’re excited to add something fun that (we hope) boosts activity and community energy — while keeping the rest of the site working as usual.
If anything is unclear, or you spot issues with the new flow, please tell us.
I don't fully understand why prize drawing compliance issues mean that new users who don't want to participate in the prize drawing have to be verified but existing users don't.
If this is primarily about spam, that's fine. It was evidently far too easy to create spam and sockpuppet accounts until now and I don't think anyone will miss them. I would've thought there were other ways of addressing this that are less onerous on the prospective user, but perhaps they aren't effective enough?
Anyway, unverified new users should really get a small mana balance so that they can try out the site before committing to it.
Last time I didn't bother to audit the "provably fair" randomization since it was all charity anyways, but in the interest of avoiding another debacle this time now that it's real money, here are my thoughts:
1. If you want to ensure that manifold cannot manipulate the result, you need to publish the exact algorithm somewhere ahead of time, including details like the format you will use for the Bitcoin hash. Otherwise some degrees of freedom remain to pick between different results. If this exists somewhere, I wasn't able to find it.
2. You claim that nobody can influence the Bitcoin hash, but that's not true -- Bitcoin miners definitely could influence this to some extent, and could use the algorithm above to see who will win from a given hash and discard unfavorable ones. Obviously nobody would bother when the prize is only $1000 since the Bitcoin mining is more lucrative, but it's something to consider if the manifold prize was a few orders of magnitude larger.
3. This probably isn't strictly necessary with the current prize size, but if you want to preemptively address both 1 and 2, here's what I would propose. Publish your selection algorithm except for two parameters: a secret seed, and the TBD Bitcoin hash. Publish the hash of the secret seed. After the Bitcoin block is mined, then reveal the secret seed. Since the secret seed is unknown prior to the block mining, miners cannot influence the result. Likewise manifold cannot influence the result since they are already committed to the secret seed and don't know the Bitcoin hash yet.
Separately -- when I started to read this post I thought for sure it was some kind of spam/hack and not a real manifold post. I think I'm convinced now that it's legit, but let's just say that it's still not a great vibe :)
@A One caveat on my proposal (item 3): Technically manifold could still manipulate this by doing Bitcoin mining themselves, since they know the secret. But realistically that's probably safe to ignore since it should be impractically expensive for manifold to control a relevant percentage of mining rate. You do have to trust that they're actually keeping the secret seed secret though, and not sharing it with their favored Bitcoin miner friends on the side.
@A TLDR, it's surprisingly tricky to actually make things provably random with an underlying protocol that wasn't designed for that (Bitcoin), which is why I prefer to outsource that to something like drand (https://github.com/drand/drand)
This is:
A monetization scheme that I can't participate in due to location
A monetization scheme that will alienate normies
A identification verification scheme that is offensive to casual new registrations, many potential crypto high-rollers, and aesthetically distasteful to the existing userbase
A monetization scheme that is actually gambling
A form of gambling that while partially skill based is still rather predatory! The EV of buying 1 ticket is difficult to determine since it is dependent on other player behavior but I strongly suspect will not be worth it for most users with under 100k mana. The bonding curve thing, which is quite hidden and not mentioned on the ticket purchase page itself, actually means that it is a race to buy tickets and that waiting largely sub-optimal (depending on exactly how it works???)
@ProjectVictory where's the location check or list of allowed locations by the way? I just claimed free entry without being prompted for location or ID.
@ProjectVictory the geoblock should prevent you from participating and display a warning. If it doesn’t, and you’re ineligible, you need to self exclude.
@xjp you get 0 free starting mana if you don't do ID, I believe. But you can still bet if you got some mana. (I think)
@xjp it is required for new users to get bonuses/comment, but they can still participate by funding their account in other ways (managrams, purchases).
@Gen how do bots get allowed to comment?
Can an existing user vouch for someone who doesn't want to do ID verification?
@Gen That change will single handedly kill the site if you don't reverse it. Most new users will not be willing to give you their face and ID, especially because this is basically an online game as opposed to e.g. a financial institution where ID verification is standard. People are more wary of data leaks than ever. And with 0 free starting mana and no quest bonuses, new users can't participate and will simply leave.
I can tell you for certain I never ever would have gotten started on this site with this requirement in place.
@xjp True, I would have never signed up either. Most people (of those that stay) start liking Manifold a few days to years after they join. If a random site asked for ID to play a game you've probably never heard of and has only 3,000 users (Manifold currently), why would you give your data?
@Gen fwiw I would immediately stop using manifold if ID verification became a requirement for existing users, and I would never have completed signup if it was a requirement at the time.
@retr0id FWIW they are already fully aware that a huge portion of existing users would not have joined if there was an ID requirement, but they are committed to this partly because they dream about enticing the millions of other people in the world who wouldn't blink at being asked to provide ID.
@ian whatever ones I was looking at a few weeks ago lol. I even mostly stopped betting on the boosts 2x sales one.