What makes the decentralized prediction market TrueMarkets different, attracting Vitalik to mint NFTs with 32 ETH?

Author: Nancy, PANews

Despite facing strict scrutiny and challenges from U.S. regulators, Polymarket gained fame by accurately predicting the U.S. elections and successfully igniting interest in the prediction market space. Behind the rise of Polymarket is strong support from figures like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Now, another decentralized prediction market, TrueMarkets, has also gained Vitalik's favor and endorsement.

On November 19, according to monitoring by Shield, the on-chain address marked as "vitalik.eth" has bridged 32 ETH from the Ethereum chain to Base and minted 400 Patron NFTs.

Vitalik's "endorsement" immediately drew market attention. Data from OpenSea shows that over 3,300 Patron NFTs were sold in the past 24 hours, with sales totaling approximately 703 ETH, ranking first in daily trading volume in the market. As of the time of publication, the floor price of Patron NFTs has risen to 0.23 ETH, more than 2.8 times the minting price (0.08 ETH).

According to reports, Patron NFTs are launched by TrueMarkets, a decentralized binary prediction market based on Base that allows users to predict the outcomes of real-world events, aiming to break the information asymmetry related to global news, thus enabling people to express real-time sentiment about the likelihood of potential outcomes. TrueMarkets plans to release its V1 version by the end of this year.

The operational mechanism of TrueMarkets is largely similar to that of prediction platforms like Polymarket, simplifying complex event predictions into two answers: "yes/no," and creating a binary trading market based on this. The two answers will be adjusted in real-time according to the perceived odds of the outcome, with traders and market makers providing liquidity to maintain market balance and stability. When the outcome of an event is finally revealed, the tokens matching the correct answer can be redeemed at a value of $1, while the incorrect ones lose all value.

However, TrueMarkets also has its unique features. According to Millie, the project lead of TrueMarkets, in most other prediction markets, minting prediction tokens is typically limited to whitelisted users, but TrueMarkets will ultimately achieve a permissionless model, with market creation facilitated by AI Agents. Additionally, all transactions on TrueMarkets are conducted directly on-chain via Uniswap V3, including trading, liquidity provision, and market creation. TrueMarkets uses an oracle established through protocols to interpret market results, combining decentralized jury pools to achieve accurate decision-making transparently.

It is worth mentioning that TrueMarkets has also opened a challenge window, during which anyone can contest proposed solutions. To prevent manipulation and ensure the orderly operation of the oracle, TrueMarkets introduces an important role called Disputer. Specifically, when a prediction result triggers a dispute, a Disputer can challenge it by paying a $250 deposit and stating their reasons for the challenge. If their challenge is accepted, the Disputer not only recovers the deposit but also receives a corresponding reward. To ensure fairness and justice, TrueMarkets has set up a three-stage arbitration mechanism, including challenges to preliminary proposals, decisions by the oracle committee, and disputes voted on by token holders. Each stage requires the Disputer to pay different challenge costs of $250, $5,000, and holding 250,000 platform tokens (TRUE), respectively.

Additionally, while Polymarket has been reported to potentially conduct token airdrops, the platform has not explicitly stated that it will issue its own token. In contrast, TrueMarkets has announced its tokenomics and will launch its Token Generation Event (TGE) by the end of this year.

According to reports, TRUE is a multifunctional utility token within TrueMarkets, used for controlling protocol fees and governance, among other things. The total supply of TRUE is 100 million, of which 40.3% is allocated to holders of Oracle Patron NFTs (15,071) and Truth Seeker Patron NFTs (59), with each NFT corresponding to 2,666.67 TRUE tokens; 2.2% is airdropped to Discord and beta users; 7.5% is for market incentives; 12.5% will be distributed to TRUE/ETH liquidity providers (LPs) on Base over two years; 12.5% is allocated for oracle incentives; and the remaining 25% will be allocated to the TrueMarkets team and advisors, unlocking linearly over two years.

"Once a prediction market reaches a critical scale, a strong feedback loop is formed. The broader its audience, the more accurate the predictions become. Elections are a turning point for prediction markets, as this event has proven that such platforms are the most accurate indicators and primary news sources. Looking ahead, it is expected that the world will increasingly rely on prediction markets for news and entertainment, and the more people participate, the stronger the predictive capabilities of the prediction markets will become," Millie stated regarding the future prospects of prediction markets.