Play Mu-ney
People love to gamble. NYTimes had a story on the popularity of sports betting recently: “One in five Americans has bet on sports in the past year, according to research from the Pew Research Center. During the first half of 2022, Americans placed an average of nearly $8 billion a month in legal sports bets, compared with under $1 billion a month three years earlier, according to SportsHandle, a trade publication. Some analysts have predicted that figure could climb to $20 billion a month by 2026.” It is estimated that more than 140 million Indians use sports betting sites, with the number more than doubling during cricket tournaments like the Indian Premier League. Sports betting provides instant gratification and outcomes are known in minutes or hours.
There is a vast world of events beyond sports – politics, economic, financial, weather, and more. While the stock markets offer many sophisticated instruments for traders to bet on global and company news, there are very limited options for betting or predicting future events – and then being able to boast “I told you so.” This is where prediction markets with ‘play money’ (as opposed to real money) can come in.
I have written extensively in the past about Atomic Rewards and Loyalty 2.0 with Mu as the token for attention and data and MuCo as the entity building the Muniverse. From “The MuCo Future”: “MuCo is thus running a 2-sided marketplace between brands and consumers. The challenge such marketplaces face is the ‘cold start’ problem – creating enough demand on both sides to get activity going. To overcome this problem, MuCo may need partners who can help accelerate the process of getting Mu in the hands of consumers. It will also need to create an attractive shop to get consumers to see the value and utility of Mu before brands start coming in with their own offerings. This is where MuCo will need initial capital to bootstrap itself.” From “Muniverse Monetisation”: “MuCo enables brands to build hotlines with existing customers in the upstream (attention and data) and downstream (network and voice) by offering a lubricant in the form of Atomic Rewards (Mu points and tokens), thus enabling exchanges which are not happening today. MuCo ends over-reliance by brands on new customers, and instead enables better and deeper relationships with the existing customers – whose acquisition costs have already been paid. MuCo gives marketers a lever in the form of micro-incentives to offer customers to influence their behaviour for non-monetary actions, just as traditional loyalty programs nudge repeat transactions. MuCo’s pitch to brands: pay customers, not Big Adtech.”
Mu is the incentive offered by brands to their customers for the upstream of a transaction (attention and data) and the downstream (ratings, reviews and referrals). For Mu to be attractive, it also needs multiple places where it can be used. In my essays, I have discussed four options: Gamelets, MuShop, MuMarket, and MuExchange. Prediction Markets can be the fifth and perhaps most interesting option in the Muniverse.
