ActiveGrant
$1,000raised
$5,000funding goal

Project summary

Adjacent News is a new-age media startup that is focused on using prediction markets to add context to the news you already read, where you read it and generate net new news that is driven by odds changes in the markets.

Below is a quick summary of what we are building, the full private beta launch post can be found at Adjacent News Private Beta.

We currently have a few products that vary in stages from Alpha to Private Beta

  • API (docs.adj.news)

    • Want to build your own integration? We support querying 40k+ markets across various platforms, fetching related news, and related markets for them.

We will be launching

  • A refresh of the data platform

    • Support for historical data, related news, related markets, and more

    • Support for more exchanges

  • Market driven news platform

    • As trades come in for markets we will look for large changes in odds, fetch relevant news, and produce net new content with the market odds and distribute it through various platforms such as RSS, podcast, newsletter, traditional news site

      • This is true “Market Driven News”

Everything we are building is opensource and can be found at https://github.com/orgs/adjacentresearchxyz/repositories?q=adj.news

We currently have around 300 WAU across the variety of products

You can view screenshots of these platforms in the following document

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

Prediction markets struggle for a few reasons

  • Discovery

  • Oracles / Settlement Criteria

  • Long Bets

  • Liquidity

But are very beneficial for forward looking news, they successfully beat or are the first to predict / inform on things like

We are solving the discovery problem by highlighting forward looking markets alongside current news. Markets are highlighted by

  • Overlaying contextual markets to the news you are reading for example on Twitter / X, NYT, WSJ, or any new source

  • Through an all in one RSS reader platform that lets you read any RSS source you want with embedded markets highlighted

  • Soon via Adjacent producing our own news driven by changes in any market

You can read a more about our goals and longer term roadmap as a media startup in our one pager.

A lot of members of the forecasting community are likely familiar with Base Rate Times who is / was focused on a lot of the same concepts we are. “News Aggregation”, “538 for prediction markets”, “Forecasts being underutilized by the media**”.** While we are solving for the same problem: Discoverability of prediction markets and using markets as a way to easily synthesis forward looking news.

We are approaching it significantly different. Adjacent is focusing on

  1. Building a robust data platform and API across various exchanges and platforms, aggregating all the markets that exist

  2. Adding context via markets to the news that you currently read, whatever you read. We use vector embeddings to match up any headline / article with any related market and show them to the reader

  3. Generating our own news based on market movements

Our goal is to be the leading media company that is producing news content driven by prediction markets and the go to data platform for checking market odds and related news across a variety of exchanges.

How will this funding be used?

Right now this project is fully bootstrapped and I work on it on the nights and weekends, this would allow for us to start to focus more time on this project and

  • Bring the Alpha and Beta products into full production

  • Launch Data Platform refresh

  • Build and launch a market driven news platform

  • Support more prediction market exchanges

  • Marketing and further focus on distribution across other and new platforms

  • Upgrade our infrastructure

Why now? The election is top of mind for everyone and its the perfect time to focus on marketing and distribution of prediction market driven news platform.

Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

Currently the team is just me Lucas Kohorst (X, Website). I have built many open source projects which can be found on my Github and via Adjacent Research. I have written about prediction markets under Ramblings on Event Markets and attended Manifest last year!

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

I will continue to build Adjacent as a hobby project on nights and weekends, however in order to expand the various products, supported exchanges, increase distribution across other news channels, etc. the biggest likely cause for failure would be funding.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

No other funding to date, we are fully bootstrapped.

If you are interested in this project, have questions, would like to explore a partnership or generally just want to chat you can reach me at via mail at lucas@adjacentresearch.xyz , on X at https://twitter.com/0xperp, or via Telegram at t.me/lucaskohorst.

donated $380
Austin avatar

Austin Chen

2 months ago

I thought this was a surprisingly polished project, given that Lucas has been working on this alone. I'm not sure there's enough of a market for such a data platform given how small the forecasting community is atm, but I appreciate the care that has gone into building this.

lucas avatar

Lucas Kohorst

2 months ago

@Austin Thank you! Appreciate it and everything you’ve done at manifold and manifund!

going to keep building and distributing market driven news and slowly grow the community!

donated $141
Dglid avatar

David Glidden

3 months ago

Donating to this because I had a similar idea myself, https://thepredictionpost.substack.com/, that I've since discontinued. Love the data and infrastructure angle of this project though. Best of luck! 💪

lucas avatar

Lucas Kohorst

3 months ago

@Dglid I was a reader for a little bit. Thanks!

donated $141
Dglid avatar

David Glidden

2 months ago

@lucas just stumbled upon something that might be relevant: https://www.safe.ai/blog/forecasting (see "News stories." section)

lucas avatar

Lucas Kohorst

2 months ago

@Dglid Very cool, thanks for sharing I like the concept a lot although have some concerns on the actual answering (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGkRcHqatmPkvpGLq/contra-papers-claiming-superhuman-ai-forecasting)

But I’m sure that will get better very quickly. Something to add to the roadmap!

donated $141
Dglid avatar

David Glidden

2 months ago

@lucas already ahead of me! 💪

donated $224
wasabipesto avatar

wasabipesto

3 months ago

Wow, I love what you’ve done so far. As someone who’s gone through the same process, your blog post on serverless ETL was very interesting!

  • I think the new data platform screenshots are great. Being able to successfully match markets to trending news stories is nothing short of magical. If you can connect equivalent markets across platforms then I’d likely just start using your API instead of building my own!

  • I think the RSS reader idea is nice, but I don’t see myself moving away from FreshRSS anytime soon. I am quite interested in a newsletter however!

lucas avatar

Lucas Kohorst

3 months ago

@wasabipesto Thank you! Related markets, and related news are live as part of the API now (https://x.com/0xperp/status/1823162851155935237?s=46&t=La_aB1yOqcakDZk059XH-w). Data platform refresh and newsletter looking to be released in Sept.

Big fan of calibration.city. Would actually love to chat more. Is the best place to contact you the email on your site?

donated $224
wasabipesto avatar

wasabipesto

3 months ago

@lucas I just shot you a DM on discord, but email works as well!

lucas avatar

Lucas Kohorst

3 months ago

I have created a market on Manifold for the number of WAU Adjacent News gets by end of September.

https://manifold.markets/lucaskohorst/number-of-weekly-active-users-on-ad?r=bHVjYXNrb2hvcnN0

Planning on exploring putting up more markets