After years of forward-thinking innovation, prediction markets are no longer looking to the future — they’re looking to the past.
A new platform called Verifact Markets is hoping to allow users to trade on events that have already occurred, but that do not have universally agreed-upon outcomes. This represents a distinct difference from Kalshi, Polymarket, and other leading competitors, which are constantly creating and settling markets in real-time.
Verifact joining prediction markets wave
How are prediction markets supposed to help predict events that finished years, decades, centuries, or millenniums ago?
Verifact Markets doesn’t want its user base to cast opinions on which team will win on Monday Night Football, or who will win the United States Presidential Election. Instead, users will cast opinions in the form of prediction contracts on events with questioned or unconfirmed results.
“For the first time, you can trade on disputed facts, help determine what's true or false, submit evidence, and make a profit,” a LinkedIn post from Peter Wokwicz, CEO of Positron Capital Management, the hedge fund backing the new trading platform, read.
Prediction markets offered by Verifact will present disputed scenarios, along with “True” and “False” options for users to choose, asking the question, “Did the event conclude as described?”
Contracts will be priced between $0-1 based on market sentiment. Contracts will settle once market probability reaches a certain threshold, with the company citing a 10% margin on either side. That means above 90% or below 10% for settlement.
Market prices evolve as evidence is submitted and analyzed by the platform. A patent-pending system will take evidence collected through the platform’s technology and signals from market movement to determine how the probability will change over time.
If the market never reaches the required threshold, it will expire. Traders will receive a payout based on the last trading price.
Predicting the past
Prediction markets have expanded forward, by pushing into new jurisdictions and products, and horizontally, by covering more industries. But none have gone back in time like Verifact.
The inclusion of past events opens prediction markets to a world of controversy — even though it doesn't want to retell old stories.
“We're not trying to rewrite history,” the platform wrote in its launch materials. “We're trying to crowdsource the truth about events where reliable information has been scarce or contested." The markets resolve when credible evidence emerges - court documents, leaked recordings, or authoritative investigations that definitively settle the question.”
Hypothetical examples of Verifact prediction markets could include the stories of the John F. Kennedy assassination, the legitimacy of the moon landing, the September 11 terror attacks in New York.
Notably, Verifact Markets don’t necessarily settle when facts are proven. Instead, they rely on market sentiment and believability. Presenting new information also won’t re-open closed prediction markets.
This development comes as prediction markets are facing increasing scrutiny. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission recently warned platforms about the dangers of mention markets, which allow users to profit if they can predict words or phrases that will be said during a specific event.
State regulators across the country have also pushed back on sports event contracts, which allow platforms to offer markets that resemble sports betting odds, in the eyes of gaming officials.
The Trade Handle Prediction Markets Take
Verifact’s patent-pending technology to evaluate material and adjust market probability is the key to the platform’s success. The concept of the platform ventures off the beaten path, but it aligns with the modern attitude of general distrust and misinformation. Launching the platform would introduce an entirely new vertical within the prediction platform industry.