SoK: Market Microstructure for Decentralized Prediction Markets (DePMs)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Decentralized prediction markets (DePMs) allow open participation in event-based wagering without fully relying on centralized intermediaries. We review the history of DePMs which date back to 2011 and includes hundreds of proposals. Perhaps surprising, modern DePMs like Polymarket deviate materially from earlier designs like Truthcoin and Augur v1. We use our review to present a modular workflow comprising eight stages: underlying infrastructure, market topic, share structure and pricing, market initialization, trading, market resolution, settlement, and archiving. For each module, we enumerate the design variants, analyzing trade-offs around decentralization, expressiveness, and manipulation resistance. We also identify open problems for researchers interested in this ecosystem.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".