Roadmap
A roadmap without kill criteria is a wish list. Each phase below states the gate to proceed and the condition under which the correct decision is to stop, and the kill criteria are set in the same typeface, at the same size, as the gates.
The ordering is deliberate and contrarian: the cheapest, most falsifiable things happen first. Any plan that builds the brokerage before testing whether anyone will fill in a falsifier field has the risk ordering backwards.
Six phases
| Phase | Gate to proceed | Kill criterion | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| −1 Offline validation 0–2mo |
Engine beats naive and market out-of-sample on ≥2 public corpora | It doesn't. The engine is the product. | Here |
| 0 Forecasting only 0–9mo |
5,000 forecasters · ≥30% commit 10+ priors in 60 days · 3 design partners | Composer completion <15% | Not started |
| 1 Resolution & records 9–18mo |
500+ at Established · top decile skill >0 vs market, out-of-sample | No cohort beats the market reference | Not started |
| 2 First revenue 15–24mo |
$1.5M ARR from ≥10 institutions | <$300k ARR after 9 months selling | Not started |
| 3 Brokerage 24–36mo |
BD registration · execution at or better than PFOF venues | Can't hit competitive execution without rebates, stay a signal business | Not started |
| 4 Token 36mo+ |
Profitable without it · counsel in every jurisdiction | No compliant structure, ship without the token | Not started |
The next task, specifically
Replay the existing harness against Metaculus question histories, Good Judgment Open, and historical prediction-market prints. sim/validate.js already accepts that input shape, it needs a loader and a real dataset. This is the actual Phase −1 gate, and it de-risks everything downstream. It is also the cheapest thing on this page.
Distributing control
The protocol's entire value rests on one property: a record nobody can edit. If a single entity controls resolution, it controls every score, and that property is false no matter how many token holders vote on parameters. Governance-first distribution of control is theatre.
| Stage | What moves | Gate to proceed |
|---|---|---|
| 0. Verifiable now |
Nothing distributed yet, everything auditable. Roots anchored, reveals verifiable, code open | Anyone can independently recompute every score from public data |
| 1. Resolution | k-of-n bonded independent resolvers; disputes | ≥7 operators · none >20% of claims · 30 days no unresolved disputes |
| 2. Adapter registry | Open proposal, bonded authorship, fee share to author | ≥50 adapters · ≥20 distinct authors · <2% disputed |
| 3. Parameters | n₀, half-life, extremization bounds, thresholds | Changes demonstrably improve out-of-sample Brier |
| 4. Treasury & upgrades | Spending, upgrades, fee levels | Stages 1–3 stable for 12 months |
Adapter lifecycle
propose → bond → shadow (90 days resolving in public,
nothing depending on it) → ratify → live → earn
Bonded, slashable on proven misresolution, and forkable, anyone
may propose a competing adapter, operators choose, and the better spec wins on
disagreement rate. This is closer to open-source package maintenance than to
governance.
Capture risks
Risks
01 · High
The composer asks for a claim, a probability, a horizon and a falsifier. Robinhood asks for a tap. If honest conversion is 10:1 rather than 2:1, there is no consumer product at any level of elegance.
Detection: a forecasting-only phase measuring composer completion. If <30% of registered users commit 10+ priors in 60 days, the thesis is wrong, and no money has been spent.
02 · Certain
The unsolved one, and the most likely technical cause of death. Currently rests on proof-of-uniqueness, which is not solved in general.
Shrinkage (n₀ = 100) and market-relative scoring raise the cost but do not eliminate the shotgun attack: register many identities, forecast randomly, surface the lucky one. The question is whether defences hold, not whether it is attempted.
03 · Medium-high
Funds are slow and suspicious of retail-sourced anything. The entire revenue model assumes institutional buyers who may simply never sign.
Mitigation: design partners signed before the corpus exists, with the claim taxonomy built to their spec rather than ours.
04 · Medium
They can ship the composer in a sprint. What they cannot ship is an honest scoreboard that tells users to stop trading, or hand back half of signal revenue, or abandon $776M a quarter of transaction revenue.
We are not better at the feature, we are differently paid. That is the moat, and it is a business-model moat, not a technical one.
05 · Low but existential
Returns depend on sizing, timing, costs and tails, not only directional accuracy. Calibration is necessary and not sufficient.
Hence Kelly sizing in the composer, and positioning the signal as an input to a process rather than as a trade recommendation.
Failure modes 1 and 3. Both are testable in a forecasting-only phase, for a fraction of the cost of building a brokerage.
That is the entire argument for the phase ordering on this page. Everything expensive is deliberately downstream of everything falsifiable.
Regulatory posture
| Exposure | Severity | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Investment adviser status | High | Publishing scored, personalised forecasts users act on |
| Token as security | High | Staking with fee-linked returns |
| Broker-dealer obligations | Medium | Standard, expensive, not novel |
| Data rights over user priors | Medium | Licensing user-generated content that is also personal data |
The publisher's exclusion narrows sharply once content is personalised. Mitigations: the platform never states a probability, users and registered agents do; no personalisation in the institutional feed; and register as an RIA if the honest reading requires it. That is the likely answer. Budget for it.
Launching anonymously from a jurisdiction with no framework. It forecloses every institutional buyer, and institutional buyers are the revenue model. No fund compliance desk subscribes to a signal feed from an anonymous team.
The compliant path is not the cautious option here, it is the only one where the business exists.