Coco – app that curates group feeds using prediction markets

Hey guys!

I released Coco a few days back. You can try it out here – http://cocoverse.club.

It's like reddit, where you can create groups and users can post to the group feed. With the difference being – Instead of upvoting or downvoting a post, users participate in prediction market to predict whether other users & group moderators will like the post.

It works the following way – When a user makes a post, simultaneously a prediction market on the post is created. After this, anyone can place their prediction of whether others & group moderators will like the post (i.e. if you think that they will, you place a YES prediction, otherwise a NO prediction). After a while, the prediction period ends and the most favoured outcome (i.e. the outcome that the market favoured; YES or NO) is set as the temporary outcome. You can challenge the temporary outcome by putting some amount at stake, after which your favoured outcome becomes the new temporary outcome. Challenge period only lasts for sometime & repetitive challenges can only happen a few times. If a temporary outcome isn't challenged before the challenge period expires, it is set as the final outcome. If repetitive challenges hit the limit of few times, then the group moderators step in to declare the final outcome. Once the final outcome is declared and your prediction was right, you can redeem initial amount that you put in for prediction + profit.

The prediction markets work like any other binary event (YES or NO) prediction markets. And to place a prediction, you buy (using WETH) outcome shares of the respective outcome. If your prediction is right (i.e. the outcome of which shares you own is declared as the final outcome), you can redeem 1 WETH for every right outcome share you own. Since when buying outcome shares you always receive more units of shares than WETH you spend (how much more? – depends on outcome shares bought by others before you), your profit upon redeeming would be: (1 WETH – average price (in WETH) paid per share) * shares you own.

Reason for using prediction markets is – (1) they are a good way to aggregate information (2) market prices of outcome shares are good estimations of probability of respective outcome occurring. In our case, a post's prediction market asks whether the post will be liked by others & group moderators. Thus market prices of YES and NO outcome shares give us the probability of the post being liked by others. And this is how it is decided what stays on the group feed – Only posts that have high YES probability in their prediction market appear on your feed (In Coco, you can adjust YES probability threshold for yourself. By default it is 50%).

I think group feeds on Coco can be quite interesting. Primarily because prediction markets are used to aggregate information on whether a post will be liked or not (or, in other words, is valuable for the community or not). This enables Coco group feeds to only consist of posts that are valuable filtered out from all the noise that is posted.

You can try Coco here – http://cocoverse.club

I also released a medium post on Coco (targeted towards a more general audience) – https://medium.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/meet-coco-6f0f7c8f5e3

​

PS – Coco is still on v1 and is only available on Testnet (Arbitrum testnet). Also, at present a group cannot have more than one moderator and posts only support images. In the upcoming version, more post types support will be added along with ability to have more than 1 moderators per group.