Kaspa Developer Manyfest Targets Ownerless Prediction Market for End-2026

Kaspa developer Manyfest is building an ownerless prediction market on the network's base layer, with tradable outcome tokens and a mainnet release targeted for the end of 2026.

Manyfest, identified as Sivan Helfer on Kaspa's developer forum, said in a Nov. 11 X post that he has spent recent months working with Bit Cat (@maxibitcat) to turn the proposal into an Argent application. The system would have no owner and no beneficiary; only Kaspa network miners would benefit from its operation.

Participants could create and join markets while running their own application code, according to Helfer. The year-end 2026 target remains a development plan, and the announcement described work as underway rather than complete.

How would the market work?

Each prediction would be represented by a tradable, fungible KCC20 token carrying extra logic for voting. Helfer said Argent has made it easier to code the covenant system as a series of states within Kaspa's UTXO transaction model. Although the concept could be written as a single Ethereum Virtual Machine program, he said the state-based design felt natural to implement through UTXO covenants.

The plan is distinct from separate Kaspa development that uses an EVM-compatible second layer. Gate's Kasplex Layer 2 integration enabled KAS transfers through the exchange in April, as crypto.news previously reported. Kasplex's documentation describes offchain execution, with Kaspa providing transaction ordering and data availability.

In Bit Cat's July 10 forum sketch, anyone could post a question and an expiry date. Minting would create equal numbers of YES and NO tokens, backed by funds committed to the market, with trading available through compatible decentralized exchanges. After expiry, token holders would vote during a defined window before holders on the winning side could claim payouts.

Why would losing holders vote honestly?

The settlement mechanism grew out of a July discussion on how to encourage participants to report outcomes honestly when their financial position gives them a reason to dispute results.

Helfer initially asked whether a separate stake could reward honest voting and penalize answers outside the majority. Bit Cat favored rewards instead: losing tokens would enter a lottery, but only when their holders voted with the majority.

His July 11 reply proposed making voting necessary to receive any payout. Winning holders would have a clear reason to participate, while losing holders could still qualify for the lottery by reporting the result the majority accepts.

Bit Cat acknowledged the mechanism would not be immune to manipulation. He said he expected liquid markets with uncontroversial questions to suit it better. His stated conditions included participation that is not too concentrated and a shared belief that the true outcome is slightly more likely to prevail.

An Aug. 27 revision changed the treatment of unclaimed winning rewards: they would be burned rather than redistributed. Bit Cat said the amendment supported a more general result covering participants who hold both token types and vote differently with individual tokens.

What are the risks and use cases?

In a separate X post, Bit Cat described event-linked contracts as risk-management tools, citing a bar owner seeking protection against a lockdown or a winemaker concerned about an unusually hot summer.

"It's fundamentally a protocol, a set of open rules," he wrote, describing participants finding one another and agreeing on useful terms.

The forum proposal supports binary questions. In August, Bit Cat clarified that an inflation contract could ask whether a particular CPI reading would exceed a threshold, while stressing that settlement questions should leave as little room for ambiguity as possible.

US regulators have addressed manipulation in event contracts through requirements placed on exchanges. A September warning on mention contracts covered outcomes tied to an individual's speech, attendance or interactions. The CFTC's Sept. 22 advisory reminded designated markets to list contracts that are not readily susceptible to manipulation.

Polymarket's regulated US operations run through QCX, which the CFTC lists as a designated contract market, with an original designation dating to July 2025.

Helfer's own warning focused on scale: smaller markets would be easier to manipulate under the current design. "Inevitably, people would lose money in this social experiment," he wrote.

With the mainnet release still roughly two years out, the proposal's fate hinges on whether covenant-based settlement on Kaspa's base layer can attract liquid, uncontroversial markets that resist the manipulation risks its own designers have flagged.