At least one prediction market platform is preparing for a future of non-human traders. Futuur is a prediction market exchange that has been live since 2018. It offers play- and real-money markets and is built on the promise of prediction markets to tell the future.
Tom Bennett, the founder of Futuur, sat down with Prediction News at Manifest 2025 to discuss what sets his company apart from other platforms launching in the rapidly growing industry.
“One differentiator is that we have play money as well [as real money],” Bennett said.
“And I think there’s real value in getting more forecasters on board making their predictions, allowing us to identify who…the super forecasters amongst the play money bettors [are].”
A future focused on forecasting power
Bennet and his company are driven by an interest in using crowdsourced data to produce more accurate forecasts. He hopes his platform can inform better decision-making for individuals, businesses, and even policymakers.
“We’ve published a number of analyses of ‘How accurate are our forecasts’, despite the fact that we have lower real-money volume than the other platforms to date, and that’s because we’re an AMM [automated market maker] …which incur slippage if you want to make a bigger bet.”
An automated market maker can change contract prices between the time traders submit their trades and when the trade is confirmed. Even with imperfect prices, Futuur has maintained its platform’s accuracy.
One study found Futuur’s average Brier Score, a measure of a dataset’s accuracy, over four years was .168. A Brier Score measures a prediction’s accuracy by giving it a score between 0 and 1, where 0 is perfect accuracy and 1 is perfect inaccuracy.
For comparison, someone who assigned a 50% chance to every event would have a Brier Score of .25. An event that is predicted to happen 60% of the time and does happen would have a Brier Score of .16. One study has found that crypto prediction market platform Polymarket had an average Brier Score of .15.
Futuur has shown that its markets outperform random chance in spite of the limitations of its AMM. However, upcoming technologies could improve its pricing in both its real and play money markets.
Futuur: New features, old tactics
At Manifest, Futuur was in the early stages of an expansion of new features that would modernize the platform. The company launched its order book, which would make it possible for users to place limit orders as commercial platforms allow. However, Futuur’s real-money markets still aren’t available in the United States.
“Right now, we operate using a gaming license from Anjouan,” Bennett said. “It’s an umbrella license that allows us to operate globally with real money, with restrictions for a few countries, including, unfortunately, the U.S…And we’re watching what’s happening at the CFTC and may well pursue a CFTC license once the dust settles there.”
One of assumed incoming CFTC Chairman Brian Quintenz’s priorities is to streamline the application process for designated contract markets (DCMs). However, even if Quintenz reduced the time to apply for and receive a license from two years to six months, the crypto industry remains a ripe target for new prediction market companies.
“We work with crypto stablecoins, but we’re not a blockchain project right now. Moving forward, I think it’s likely that we’re going to go incrementally, decentralize almost, starting with non-custodial wallets,” Bennet said.
Moving to a blockchain infrastructure is only the beginning of Bennett’s plans. There’s a larger set of preparations underway for an AI revolution.
Preparing for a future with AI traders
Many people at Manifest attended to discuss the potential and dangers of AI. The prediction market attendees had an eye on how they could be used to not only assist traders but also become autonomous traders themselves.
“I would expect, in general, that there’s going to be more AI-driven programmatic trading and better forecasts as a result, and probably more predictions, more granular predictions, more niche markets and things like that.”
AI traders would likely be available on play-money platforms first. Real-money platforms like Kalshi are governed by regulations that require them to know who their customers are and where money transfers are going. AI may be able to assist traders in aggregating information about a trade, but autonomous AI traders on real-money platforms remain a distant innovation. Futuur has play-money markets, so it’s well-placed to prepare for advanced AI traders.
“In general, we’re trying to optimize our systems for [AI trading],” Bennett said. “We just launched an MCP [model context protocol], which is a way for AIs to talk easily with our service. And so I think there’s gonna be more and more bot-driven trading, and it’s going to be informed by increasingly smart AIs. Maybe at some future date, we’ll have AIs register accounts as well. But right now, it’s the humans who need to register the account, and then they can do the work.”
It’s not clear what the future holds, but Futuur is preparing for the most ambitious paths it could take when it comes to the future of forecasting.
