TrueCast
Prediction-market powered news in your social feed
Created on 25th April 2025
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TrueCast
Prediction-market powered news in your social feed
The problem TrueCast solves
One of society’s biggest problems is how do we know what’s true?
As trust in traditional media steadily declines and AI-generated fake news spams the internet,
prediction markets emerge as a new real-time news source powered by collective intelligence.
TrueCast natively integrates the social graph to bring prediction-market powered news to everyone. After all, what's more social than discussing and sharing insights about events and headlines with your friends, whether you're speculating or just following along?
TrueCast brings a new way to monetize content. Whether you have an interesting take about a DeFi protocol, sports team or any news headline, simply embed a related prediction market in your post, provide valuable context to your audience, and earn referral rewards.
With the TrueCast mini app you can speculate on election results, sport games or other events.
Check what your friends are predicting and receive notifications for breaking news.
The TrueCast agent curates interesting events, like price spikes, and posts them on X/Farcaster/Zora, with a headline and illustrative images. Get insights and fact-checks by tagging the agent along with a question in your cast. Answers are backed by web search, social media sentiment, DeFi metrics and prediction markets.
Business model:
- Mini app: 1% fee on trades
- Newsfeed: Coined on Zora -> users collect their favorite news headlines
- Agent API: x402 pay-per-request paywall that is accessible to users and AI agents
Roadmap:
- Predict with casts
- Aggregate more data sources/prediction markets
- Collaboration with other agents that could tap into the API
Challenges I ran into
Mini app:
- Challenges: Complex dependencies with a mix of onchain contract calls and offchain databases, cron jobs and many moving parts
- Limited traction within first weeks: 200+ unique users, ~20 users receiving daily market news notifications, ~20 predictions
- One key problem was limited market availability. Even the best AI curated trending topic selection can do only so much given diverse user interests. At the same time, it does not make sense to scroll through 100s of markets in a mini app. Priority was thus to implement a mechanism to let users easily share custom markets in their casts, incentivised by referral rewards, as grow strategy.
TrueCastAgent:
While CDP AgentKit is a great framework for autonomous onchain agents, it is a relatively new project and was missing crucial features for my specific use case. I implemented those myself and made the following PRs:
- Trades via 0x router #681
- Truemarkets integration #614
- Post embeds on Farcaster and media on X #675
- Safe multi-sig wallet provider #330
- Zora Coins SDK: #704
BetTogether Smart Contract:
Recently launched, Truemarkets already features many interesting markets but liquidity is still ramping up limiting every-day users to participate without suffering from high slippage.
To overcome this, I devised a novel P2P mechanism, where 2 users with opposing view come together to place slippage-free bets (regardless of liquidity), relying on Truemarkets leading oracle solution to finalize the market.
It works as follows:
- Alice wants to bet 100 USDC on YES
- Current market odds: YES (66.7%), NO (33.3%)
- Bob accepts bet by taking opposite position: 50 USDC on NO
- 150 USDC is sent to Truemarkets to mint 150 YES + 150 NO token
- Alice receives 150 YES token worth 100 USDC, Bob 150 NO token worth 50 USDC at time of tx
- Market resolves to eg YES => YES token = 1 USDC, NO token = 0 USDC
- Alice happy, Bob sad
In a traditional web app, it would be difficult to find a counterparty. However, with TrueCast users can seamlessly share the bet offer in their social feed. For example, a user that wants to bet on the outcome of a particular NBA game, could post it to the NBA Farcaster channel to find an opposing view easily.
The implementation of the smart contract was challenging as I had to understand the Truemarkets smart contracts and Uniswap v3's specialised math operations thoroughly, think about possible attack vectors and security measures.
The full flow has been successfully tested on base mainnet, but the smart contract is unaudited and should be considered an experimental proof of concept. I limited the bet amount to 10 USDC as a precaution for now.
Tracks Applied (1)
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Technologies used
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