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Manifold Sandbox

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$2,000valuation
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Project summary

Manifold Sandbox is a 3rd party site for simulating arbitrary transactions on Manifold. Users can explore detailed annotations of the data flow that constitute transactions, learn about the formulae underpinning these transactions, and share scenarios with friends to explain their reasoning.

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

Allow users to:

  • Trace through function calls made when a user creates a market, bets, places a limit order, subsidizes, and more.

  • See a formula-oriented cost-curve view of those same transactions.

  • Run a series of transactions, with any number of users and markets; go back and alter any event in the timeline.

  • Share your galaxy-brained exploit with a link instead of a 5 paragraph essay.

  • (For devs) Show novel mechanisms transparently without having to build a dev instance.

To accomplish these goals, we run a copy of Manifold's backend within the webpage, with logging and local storage mocks inserted. We design a frontend that communicates state effectively to the user. We prioritize simulation fidelity by minimizing hand edits to the wrapped backend code.

I’ve already put some time into the project, enough to establish the efficacy of simulating Manifold’s backend on a static webpage.

How will this funding be used?

To compensate in part of the development time.

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

I'm one developer, and I'm consulting with other users to make this a broadly useful tool.

I was previously funded and worked on the browser extension ManiFans.

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

Causes:

  • Failure to create an intuitive/compelling UI

  • Inaccuracies in the simulation

  • The community just doesn't have a need for something in this vein

Failure outcomes:

  • Lack of interest from community, and a site that remains static and publicly available.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

None.

FoldyOfficial avatar

Manifold Markets

about 1 year ago

December 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0

Median Valuation: 0

SG: It seems they haven't released anything yet. Don't estimate this as being very impactful once complete.

Rachel: Not a comment on the value of the site, just hasn’t reported on any progress so far. People are saying they’d use it, so that’s a good sign!

Sinclair: idk seems kind of a developer trap - the kind of nerdsnipe prestigious project that is fun to toy around in, fun for other very smart people to play with, but ultimately not that useful. Austin made a simulator for dpm or something - was not used very much.

Inga Wei: I think this is probably to big brained to be meaningful to an average user

Austin: I think the idea here is promising; I myself would love to use a good sandbox for testing out new trading mechanisms. But as we outlined in the launch post, we’re really looking to pay for good executions instead of just good ideas. Consider shipping a v0 of your sandbox as soon as you can, so we can try it out and give feedback!

🐳

Plasma Ballin'

about 1 year ago

Sounds very interesting. I've actually been wanting something like this for a while to help me understand the exact math of prediction markets.

🐶

Eliza

about 1 year ago

I would regularly use a sandbox that allowed me to simulate trades from several users, quickly, and then inspect the state of the machine and balances.

case avatar

Case Sandberg

about 1 year ago

Will it be open source?

kenakofer avatar

Kenan Schaefkofer

about 1 year ago

@case Yes, although I haven't decided which OSS license to use.