Ben

An experiment in valuation at the world's biggest prediction market festival​

It is time for Okay Bet to raise its first round of funding. With an empty cap table, investors need some context for valuation. An effective way to make decisions and poll public opinion is with prediction markets. This market driven policy is called Futarchy and it involves having a group bet on the what the policy outcome would be in order to decide what to do in the first place. To try this out I went to the world's largest prediction market conference, Manifest 2025, to ask the best forecasters to bet on what Okay Bet is worth.

If the goal of news media is to inform the public then it is failing​

Okay Bet saw a substantial new upgrade this month with new contracts deployed and a major app update.

Here is a deep dive on the development progress​

Nate Silver, Mr. FiveThirtyEight, is famous for his professional poker performance and considered the best political pollster in the country. He knows risk and odds better than anyone. Recently, on his Risky Business podcast he mentioned that he tried sports betting for an NBA season. He wagered a total of 1.8 million dollars and spent about 5000 hours to win $5000. While that is technically making money, it works out to working for 1 dollar an hour which barely counts as a profit.

Let's see why he got a raw deal.​

Okay Bet received a $5,000 grant from the OP x Thirdweb Superchain App Accelerator program. This grant will be used to sponsor all transaction fees for Inapp wallets. This means you as a user can make and settle your bets all for free. Actually Okay Bet is not even currently monetized, this is costing me money. The least you could do is use it!

Okay Bet got launched on Product Hunt!

This was the debutante of Okay Bet for users to get in on the action with the contracts deployed on Base mainnet. With over 50 upvotes and over 20 comments I was excited to get some positive feedback after throwing it out there to the public. This also informed further iterations in both style features for Okay Bet.

The idea for Okay Bet started at the Base Onchain Summer Hackathon. Thirdweb sponsored the gaming track, and I decided to make a betting game based on escrow contracts in the parody style of Words with Friends.

Bets With Friends was deployed on the Base Sepolia testnet and, while janky, had the core betting functionality working great.

Unfortunately, my entry did not become a finalist, but I choose to believe it is due to Coinbase and our other lovely sponsors not wanting anything to do with appearing to sponsor gambling. I do not share those reservations, so I decided to continue with Okay Bet.