Comment Text:
I’m the founder of Pong. We build a Slack‑first tool that helps teams capture and keep track of the useful things they say to each other in AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT and in Slack. Before Pong I helped build the podcasting platform Callin, and I spent a few years working in the blockchain world. In all of those roles I learned how often the best ideas and explanations live inside messages and chats and never make it into a searchable knowledge base.
That’s why the idea of nonprofit prediction markets speaks to me. In my own work, asking people to surface what they know and to update that knowledge as things change makes a huge difference for everyone else on the team. A research market does the same thing at a bigger scale: it gives people a reason to share what they know about a question and keeps the answer current as opinions & research findings shift. I’m drawn to how these markets build a live signal that researchers and policymakers can learn from.
When the Commission decides whether an event contract is in the public interest, I think it should ask whether the market is being run to generate this kind of shared insight. A small, nonprofit market that tracks, say, the rollout date of a new treatment has a very different purpose than a commercial event contract. The former helps scientists and planners see where expectations stand and adjust their plans; the latter is more about speculation or entertainment. If research markets and commercial markets all fall under the same rules, the research ones will disappear. I hope you’ll carve out a straightforward way for nonprofits to run prediction markets for science and public policy so that this kind of collective forecasting has a chance to thrive.
