2026-05-09 –, Sladkovský Stage
What if bets did more than predict outcomes? What if they could help cause them? Draft-to-Funding is a mechanism where speculative liquidity around a threshold gets drafted into funding once an outcome is close enough, while preserving explicit accounting rules. This talk introduces the mechanism, maps three regimes and their sample applications: action markets, crowdfunding, token launchpad.
Prediction markets let participants speculate on what will happen, but the outcome itself is fixed by the system. Draft-to-Funding (D2F) starts from the same place — speculative bets around an outcome — and asks a different question: when can a protocol act on those bets to complete an outcome that would otherwise fail because of missing commitments or coordination?
In a D2F market, participants bet for or against a threshold being reached. These bets are not just signals; they lock real liquidity. When the pool is close enough, the protocol drafts part of the losing-side liquidity to minimally push the outcome across the line. The losing side is endogenously compensated from forfeited winning-side capital. The resulting action is exactly what bettors would rationally produce themselves if coordination were possible. D2F turns speculative demand into actual funding.
The talk introduces the mechanism through a simple example, then maps three deployment regimes and examples governed by a single design parameter: the private benefit attached to direct contribution. With no benefit, D2F can be a curator-led action market where local authorities or communities define and verify concrete outcomes they want delivered, and bettors fund and execute them. With small benefits, it turns into threshold crowdfunding. With large perks priced, for example, by a bonding curve, it underpins token launchpads. Across all three, markets do not only predict whether something will happen; they help fund and coordinate the conditions under which it happens.
Martin Štrobl is an economist at IFT and Logos, focusing on mechanism design, token economics, and coordination mechanisms for decentralized systems. He holds an MA in Economics from CERGE-EI, Prague, and a PhD in Political Economy/Economics from the University of Aarhus. Before joining the IFT, Martin was a researcher at the University of Birmingham.