What Crypto Prediction Markets Can Tell Us About Coronavirus
Project building new market mechanisms atop Ethereum, Gnosis, funds a decentralized prediction markets platform that wants to uncover useful and factual information about the coronavirus, amidst the abundance of false and conflicting news.
Coronavirus is a global challenge that caused major financial, economic, medical, and other issues, while each individual’s life has been affected by it in some way. The news about the pandemic are constant and often contradicting. But Gnosis hopes that “prediction markets can help us by providing some signal out of the noise around us,” Marc Ziade, who is responsible for business operations at Gnosis, wrote in a blog post.
Gnosis decided to support and fund the public non-profit initiative, a decentralized prediction markets platform called Corona Information Markets, by providing USD 50,000 in subsidy to create 50 information markets covering different aspects of the pandemic. The company explained that prediction markets are “a vehicle for aggregating information about the expected outcome of a future event or milestone.” Data on prediction markets is gathered by incentivizing accurate and disincentivizing false information, as well as by aggregating various information sources, incentivizing sharing expert knowledge, and creating data layers for probabilities, “giving each future outcome a quantified probability of occurring.”
Gnosis argued that by “drawing on the insights of experts is helpful in providing some guidance and enabling us to make more informed decisions for the sake of our families and our communities,” while this platform makes useful information available to everybody through enabling their fast spread.
Currently, there are nine questions open on Corona Information Markets, and six closed. For the former, the current ‘verdict‘ is as follows:
- Will hydroxychloroquine be approved as a treatment for COVID-19 by the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) by October 1st, 2020? No (65.42%).
- Will hydroxychloroquine be approved as a treatment for COVID-19 by the EMA (European Medicines Agency) by October 1st, 2020? No (51.96%).
- Will a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus be approved before the end of 2020? No (52.67%).
- How many confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 will there be globally on April 24th, 2020? 2,500,000 – 3,000,000 (97.67%) (Today it’s 2.59 million).
- How many confirmed cases of COVID-19 will there be in Spain on June 1st, 2020? >=300,000 AND <500,000 (50.98%).
- How many confirmed cases of COVID-19 will there be in Italy on June 1st, 2020? <300,000 (67.89%).
- How many confirmed cases of COVID-19 will there be in the US on June 1st, 2020? >=2,000,000 AND <3,000,000 (46.50%); <2,000,000 (40.52%).
- How many confirmed cases of COVID-19 will there be in the State of New York on June 1st, 2020? >=400,000 AND <600,000 (44.24%).
As for the closed questions, it seems that the majority was right for 5 out of 6, with only “Will be more than 20,000 new cases in the US be reported on March 30th?” being voted on as “no” (80%), but upon the resolution, the correct outcome was “yes.”
People can participate in the markets by connecting their Ethereum wallet (Metamask or Wallet Connect) and funding their wallet with USDC. After the market outcome becomes known and the market is resolved, users who made correct predictions turn profit on their trade. Corona Information Markets states that, due to the US position on information markets, US citizens, regardless of their location, and anybody physically present in the US can’t participate.
