There aren’t many places where serious discussions about polling data and technology co-exist with frivolous trivia games. But Manifest isn’t a normal conference.
“We’re half-conference and half-festival,” Manifold co-founder and CEO Stephen Grugett told Prediction News on the final day of the 2025 Manifest conference.
Manifest brought together prediction market platforms, technologists trying to predict the future, and an arm-wrestling tournament and dance party—all under the same program.
Grugett’s free-to-play prediction market platform, Manifold, briefly offered real-money markets through a sweepstakes model last year before pivoting back to entirely free play. He shared with us what went into that decision and what could be in store for Manifold’s next phase of evolution.
Manifold CEO on hosting Manifest forecasting conference
Manifold users create their own markets with their own resolution terms. Consequently, Manifold is philosophically well-suited to host Manifest. The company also benefits from the press that results from organizing the meeting of the minds.
“It raises our prestige in general, among the top-tier forecasters and writers,” Grugett said. “A lot of our impact is just that people who write about stuff online know and think about Manifold a lot more, and that will shape their future coverage of us. And that actually is very, very impactful.”
Nate Silver, David Shor, Richard Hanania, Jesse Richardson, and other important forecasters gave talks throughout the event, and that was only within politics. AI forecasters, Effective Altruists, and other niche intellectuals were in attendance as well. Manifold organizers increased the ticket price in an attempt to make the conference smaller. Still, due to the intellectual star power, Grugett saw increased attendance over the previous year.
“Someone on Twitter pointed out that our ticket price is now higher than Coachella, which, wow, is interesting,” Grugett said. “[But] we have more stars. You can’t see Scott Alexander perform there.”
It was a welcome boost to the company after having to reconsider its entry into the sweepstakes model the previous fall.
In and out of sweepstakes in a matter of months
Manifold is free to play, but traders can purchase packs of the platform’s fictional currency. Since becoming a regulated financial exchange would take several years and Manifold wanted to remain a legal onshore option for U.S. customers ahead of the 2024 election, the company decided to offer a real-money option on select markets. Customers could toggle between real and play money, mirroring the sweepstakes structure of other platforms.
“We wanted to for the sake of both industry competitiveness and in order to be able to capture more attention from our largely American audience, in advance of the election, we wanted to have something that was legal onshore in the US, and sweepstakes [was] the best way that we found to do that.”
“By the time we were able to launch in mid-September, it only took a week for the US Circuit Court to then issue the ruling de facto legalizing election betting in the U.S. So that blew the lid off of our very carefully prepared legal strategy, and then shifted a lot of onshore trading attention to Kalshi and to ForecastEx.”
While competition in the election trading space put a dent, the final nail in the coffin for Manifold’s sweepstakes model came from Kalshi’s sports contracts. Between Kalshi’s ability to legally offer prediction markets on the Super Bowl, March Madness, and now regular season games in professional and college leagues, sweepstakes markets did not offer the workaround that would have made Manifold the go-to prediction market for real-money stakes on some of the most popular events in the United States.
When asked whether state legislatures’ hostility to sweepstakes casinos in the gambling industry had anything to do with Manifold’s decision to abandon the sweepstakes model, Grugett smiled and said, “I think this decision was kind of over-determined.”
Is a real money prediction market platform in the cards for Manifold?
With sweepstakes in the rear-view mirror, Grugett is considering other ways to get Manifold back into real-money markets. He remembers the toggle between real and play money in sweepstakes markets as a hindrance to his product, since it confused new customers more than it added value for them. The infamy of the toggle option has informed the new iterations of Manifold that he’s willing to consider.
“We’re thinking more deeply about crypto, and we’ve taken the lessons from the sweepstakes era to heart and would probably introduce any new real-money offering through either a separate platform or something operated under a sister brand rather than a new feature directly in our markets,” Grugett said.
Grugett is similarly optimistic about the future of the prediction market industry. Even as Kalshi continues to face legal challenges over its sports contracts, awareness of and trading within the industry has increased enough that Grugett no longer has to pitch investors on the viability of the industry itself.
“The world is much more familiar with prediction markets than they were a year ago,” Grugett said. “And it has validated prediction markets as a business model going forward too, which will help us raise money and do a number of other things as well.”
“Previously, we had to convince investors that prediction markets were going to be a big deal. Now we just have to convince them that we’re going to have our own slice of the pie.”
