Exclusive: OpenDAO Is Building an NFT Prediction Market and Bespoke Blockchain

While the OpenDAO is building a marketplace, it is not building a marketplace for NFTs. It is building a marketplace for information about NFTs. That is, it’s building a prediction market, The Defiant has learned.

Crypto users are most likely to know of OpenDAO because of its giant airdrop of its SOS tokens to past users of OpenSea at the end of 2021 (this reporter got less than $100 worth of SOS tokens in that airdrop). What those tokens were dropped to build has been less clear up to this point.

Three Products

OpenDAO’s founder, 9x9x9, told The Defiant that he has three products in mind that should come soon. The purpose of his DAO is to make the whole market for NFTs work better.

“Everything in the NFT space, everything is so old,” he told The Defiant in a phone call. The three products coming out very soon are a prediction market, a new NFT launchpad and a bespoke blockchain custom made for the NFT ecosystem.

The prediction market will almost certainly come before January ends, he said.

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A prediction market is a place where people can make very specific bets about the future, and the people on the losing side pay the people on the winning one. On its website, it describes SOSMarket as an “experimental platform like never seen before (not competing with any existing NFT platforms).” This is the first time 9x9x9’s plans here have been reported on.

The prediction market will allow people to make bets on various aspects of the NFT market, such where floor prices (the lowest amount anyone can spend and buy an NFT from a collection) will go, which collections will be worth more in total, which collections will drop in value or even more nuanced things, such as whether Pudgy Penguins will succeed in taking control over their NFTs and making a DAO.

Liquidity and Clarity

This has been, it should be noted, the kind of product that U.S. regulators have taken a dim view of, ordering a shutdown the prediction market, Polymarket, last year for failing to license its offerings. That said, OpenDAO aims to do everything without a traditional company structure. After all, Augur, the earliest prediction market in crypto and probably the most decentralized, is still running, though it remains very small.

And as 9x9x9 noted to The Defiant, “No one will be making money off this prediction market.”

But 9x9x9 contends such a product could bring a new level of liquidity and clarity about pricing to NFTs, which could make broader financialization of the industry much more feasible than it has been so far. As The Defiant has talked with founders and investors about NFTs and DeFi (NFTeFi), they have repeatedly noted that liquidity limitations make it difficult for financial products built atop NFTs to become very sophisticated.

Due Diligence

The second product OpenDAO has in mind will be a curated platform for promising NFTs, called Mintstarter. The vaunted mint of NFTs in 2021 led to all kinds of headaches for users.

“The current issue with the project is there is gas price and gas wars,” he said. “We have 300K users. We have the largest community, we are going to do a launchpad with very heavy due diligence.”

Finally, he said, the OpenDAO community will have a blockchain to call its own. They just need to decide exactly what they want it to do, and they can quickly decide what kind of blockchain they need.

9x9x9 told The Defiant that the NFT space is more meaningful than anything else he’s seen on Ethereum so far.

“Before NFTs existed, the only thing on Ethereum you can do is buy a bunch of shitcoins and trade it back and get more ETH,” 9x9x9 told The Defiant. “Ethereum is all about making money, but making money is very boring.”