Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Details Vision for New ‘Info Finance’ Branch of Crypto Amid Rise of Polymarket

Vitalik Buterin is outlining his vision for new crypto use cases pertaining to prediction markets following the rise of betting site Polymarket.

In a new blog post, Buterin says that prediction markets are just one example of a “much larger incredibly powerful category,” which he dubs “info finance.”

Says Buterin,

“Info finance is a discipline where you (i) start from a fact that you want to know, and then (ii) deliberately design a market to optimally elicit that information from market participants.”

Buterin says the category is capable of creating implementations for social media, science, news, governance and other fields.

The Ethereum (ETH) co-creator also says that other use cases of info finance that are already in their proof-of-concept phase include advertising, personal tokens, scientific peer review and public goods funding.

“I would argue that the current decade presents a unique opportunity, for several key reasons:

• Info finance solves trust problems that people actually have. A common concern of this era is the lack of knowledge (and worse, lack of consensus) about whom to trust, in political, scientific and commercial contexts. Info finance applications could help be part of the solution.
• We now have scalable blockchains as the substrate. Up until very recently, fees were too high to actually implement most of these ideas. Now, they are no longer too high.
• AIs (artificial intelligences) as participants. Info finance is relatively difficult to make work when it must depend on humans to participate on each question. AIs greatly improve this situation, enabling effective markets even on small-scale questions. Many markets will likely have a combination of AI and human participants, especially as volume on specific questions suddenly switches from small to large.

To take full advantage of this opportunity, it’s time to go beyond just predicting elections, and explore the rest of what info finance can bring us.”

Read Buterin’s full post here.

Generated Image: Midjourney