Important Update

The bot stopped operating on May 1st 2024, because of changes in manifold.markets API, prohibiting p2p mana transfers

Thank you everyone who participated!

Motivation

Why bet anonymously?

1. Betting on success of friends’ projects
2. Betting on success of friends’ relationships
3. Betting on the solvency of your start-up as an employee

Why not just create an alt account?

1. Every bet made from the same alt account would reveal more information about the real identity of this account
2. You won’t be able to send the profits to the main account without revealing your identity
3. Manifold team will know who you are (from the mana purchase transaction)

How it works

Mana can be automatically converted to AMANA, a token on the Polygon Blockchain. This token is “shielded” by RAILGUN, meaning all transactions in this token are encrypted. Even the recipient of the transaction cannot tell who the sender was. The sender, however, can include a message, decrypt-able exclusively by the receiver. Read more about RAILGUN

Owners of the AMANA token can place a bet by sending a transaction with a specifically formatted message to a designated account.
When this transaction is processed on the blockchain, the respective bet is placed on Manifold Markets by a bot.

A few noticeable implementation details:

• When placing a bet, the app generates a new single-use wallet address to which the bet payout will be sent when the market resolves or shares are sold.
• The payout is initiated by signing a message with the secret key corresponding to the single-use payout wallet.
• When the AMANA payout arrives, it is automatically sent to the main user’s wallet.
• To display a list of previously placed bets, the app fetches all the bets made by the bot (from all users) and filters them by the payout wallet address on the client side to preserve privacy.
• All encrypted transactions occur by updating the state of the smart contract on the Polygon Blockchain. It requires the payment of token fees, which are currently processed by the server without any cost to the user. In the future, a fee for each bet may be introduced

Given all of the above, each incoming transfer to the bot on the blockchain is unidentifiable, each outgoing transfer is sent to the distinct new wallet, so it’s impossible for anyone to link any bet to a particular user

Here is a public viewing key of the bot:

82a57670726976d94031343437353765333032356664623433363165313636616364663761663834363262373965393838633630663734383662653435643638656463663561366630a473707562d94039306266366632613436306230643965393266663536623562363835373030343063336634376661396561346239666465353666636537336662373135653234

It allows everyone to view all of it’s transactions, but not to send them. Anyone can confirm, that indeed the privacy is preserved using the any other RAILGUN wallet

Considerations

All of the mana transactions on the manifold are public, so it’s known who have deposited to AMANA. Thus, it can be deduced that every bet made with AMANA is probably coming from someone who have deposited (unless they have gotten AMANA from someone else).

Depositing some specific number of mana, and immediately making the bet of the same amount would also be a strong evidence that it’s the same person

User has to keep his seed-phrase safe and secure. If the seed-phrase is lost – there is no way to recover the account

The server that processes transactions may in theory track the IPs of incoming requests. The manifold, can see which markets you were browsing while logged in (and IPs as well). Use VPN and incognito windows for added privacy.

Questions and Answers

Why not use already developed RAILGUN wallets?

• Since each bet payout has to be made to the new address (to preserve privacy), and doing it manually in existing wallets would require lots of clicks

Who pays Polygon Transaction fees?

• I pay them at the moment, but I may change my mind in the future

How can I verify the app is what is claims to be?

• All of the code is open source. You are welcome to run the wallet locally from source code.

What’s in it for you?

• Just fun. For the love of prediction markets and privacy tech

Have more questions: send us an email, or message in a telegram group