Futuur, which provides the largest selection of prediction markets available at one URL, announced that after extensive testing it is officially launching its real-money markets to forecasters around the world.  Real-money markets have been added alongside Futuur’s already existing play-money markets, with trading available in seven cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Dogecoin (DOGE), Tron (TRX), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and the USDC stablecoin.

With the goal of generating more accurate predictions via the wisdom of the crowd, Futuur provides forecasters the opportunity to bet on the outcome of future events in areas like politics, sports, science, and business.  Similar to a stock market, pricing is determined by market activity, fluctuating as traders buy and sell positions in event outcomes. The result is an always up-to-date forecast that aggregates information from across diverse perspectives and accounts for changing information over time.  Futuur makes these forecasts public and easy to interpret, providing a percentage estimate of each outcome’s likelihood to occur.

The industry-leading range of liquid markets available for betting is facilitated by an automated market maker (AMM), a type of algorithm that replaces the function of an order book in traditional exchanges, and which has been used increasingly in the world of DeFi to power decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. In Futuur’s case, the AMM provides always-on liquidity, allowing forecasters to buy or sell a position immediately, at any time, without the need for a counterparty on the other side of the transaction.

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Operating since 2017 with play-money markets, Futuur has generated crowd-driven predictions for over 44,000 events, with bets coming from more than 25,000 forecasters.  The average Brier score (a measurement used by statisticians to evaluate the accuracy of probabilistic predictions) across all resolved markets with bets is 0.168, a notable achievement given that the prize for bettors has been social reputation and skill-building, and did not include a financial component until now.

Now with the ability to bet with crypto and put more “skin in the game”, Futuur predicts that its platform will generate even more accurate forecasts.  Says founder Tom Bennett “we’re very happy with the results Futuur forecasters have generated trading our play-money markets, and we’re incredibly excited about the prospects for our real-money markets.  We expect that an additional financial incentive will lead to even better accuracy, and move us closer to our goal of helping to improve decision-making by providing more accurate forecasts.”

To underscore this, Futuur has created a market about its own markets’ performance, asking whether play-money or real-money markets resolved in 2021 will be more accurate.  The current crowd-powered estimate for the real-money and play-money versions of this market are 71% and 75%, respectively (real and play-money markets operate independently, and generate separate forecasts).

In order to offer legal real-money wagering, the platform has obtained a gaming license from the Ministry of Justice in Curaçao. This allows the service to provide real-money betting in most of the world, but it does exclude certain jurisdictions, including the US, Australia, Colombia, and the Netherlands.  For forecasters in restricted jurisdictions, not to worry!  Play money markets will continue to be available to all countries.