What sorts of possibilities lie at the intersection of forecasting and blockchain technologies? To explore this question, we’ve developed an application with support from the Tezos Foundation that cryptographically records Metaculus community forecasts, enabling their public verification for posterity. This adds an additional layer of security and prevents bad actors from making false claims about past predictions.

Tezos is one of the first proof-of-stake smart contract layer one blockchains, and the platform was built with mechanisms to ensure a vibrant decentralized ecosystem. We’re very excited to partner with them and further explore this space.

How does it work?

Every day, our Tezos app takes a snapshot of all Metaculus and Community Predictions, hashes them, constructs a Merkle Tree – thus allowing for efficient cryptographic verification of the contents of this large data structure – then publishes the Merkle Root to the blockchain. A Twitter bot tweets the unique Merkle Root hash daily. Since you can’t go back and edit tweets, this record is a simple way to prove that only a single Merkle Root is generated each day.

Interested in checking it out? Click here to get started with the app.

What’s next?

With this first basic application completed, we’re exploring future extensions, as well as new ideas that leverage blockchain technologies to build more utility into the forecasting ecosystem. We’d love to hear from you if you have fun R&D ideas we should try!

Thank you to our friends at the Tezos Foundation for supporting this work.