A team associated with Manifold Markets has created a prototype market for minting and trading impact certificates.
To help test it out, I'm sponsoring a $20,000 grants round, restricted to forecasting-related projects only (to keep it small - sorry, everyone else). You can read the details at the Astral Codex Ten post. If you have a forecasting-related project idea for less than that amount of money, consider reading the post and creating a Manifund account and minting an impact certificate for it.
If you're an accredited investor, you can buy and sell impact certificates. Read the post, create a Manifund account, send them enough financial information to confirm your accreditation, and start buying and selling.
If you have a non-forecasting related project, you can try using the platform, but you won't be eligible for this grants round and you'll have to find your own oracular funding. We wouldn't recommend this unless you know exactly what you're doing.
Does this initiative includes attempts to mitigate risks regarding incentivizing risky, net-negative projects that can end up being extremely beneficial?
For example, should an impact market fund forecasting about which particular machine learning techniques will end up being most transformative? How about a gain-of-function research effort that was completed successfully and caused the development of an extremely important vaccine? (I'm not saying the efforts in these examples are net-negative, just that they can be.)
Thanks for asking. One reason we decided to start with forecasting was because we think it has comparatively low risks compared to other fields like AI or biotech.
If this goes well and we move on to a more generic round, we'll include our thoughts on this, which will probably include a commitment not to oracular-fund projects that seem like they were risky when proposed, and maybe to ban some extremely risky projects from the market entirely. I realize we didn't explicitly say that here, which is because this is a simplified test round and we think the forecasting focus makes risks pretty unlikely.
In the unlikely event that someone proposes a forecasting project < $20,000 which we think carries significant risk, we're prepared to take those steps this time too.