The "Opportunity Market" is a new type of private prediction market that allows individuals who discover opportunities to be rewarded by acting entities. This design addresses the core issues of traditional markets, such as the lack of counterparties and information leakage, enabling anyone to bet on "opportunities." This article is based on a piece by Dave White and Matt Liston, organized, translated, and written by Foresight News. (Background: Prediction market Kalshi data: 60% of people bet that Gemini will beat ChatGPT and become the best AI LLM in 2025.) (Additional context: Coinbase will launch tokenized stocks, prediction markets, and IEOs in the U.S.: moving towards an omnipotent exchange.) Imagine discovering an unsigned band that is destined to become a huge success. Instead of rashly calling a record label, what if you could "bet" on them yourself? The "Opportunity Market" introduced in this article is precisely such a private prediction market: those who discover opportunities can earn rewards from those who take action. Record labels, research labs, and venture capital firms all want to be the first to find the next big trend. However, the individuals who first discover opportunities often lack access to institutional resources. Historically, both groups have lacked a smooth way to connect and make deals. Prediction markets extract effective signals from decentralized participants by encouraging them to stake real interests. However, if someone wants to make a million dollars by betting that "XYZ will become popular," there must be someone else to stake a million dollars that it will not. Yet, no one is willing to bet against thousands of "opportunities" they've never heard of. The natural counterparties in such markets should be those who have the capacity to take action: such as record labels, employers, funds, etc. However, if they provide liquidity in a public prediction market, they are effectively "subsidizing" information, which can be easily exploited by competitors. The Opportunity Market solves this problem by "only revealing market prices to the initiators." A record label might provide $25,000 in liquidity for the proposition "Will we sign artist XYZ in 2025?" This portion of "indiscriminate funds" can be won by scouts as long as they act early. When the label sees the price of that proposition rise, they will interpret it as an early signal worth investigating further. Prices and positions will only be made public after the "opportunity window" (e.g., two weeks). It's like a decentralized scouting program where anyone in the world can participate by staking real interests. The real challenge lies in the fact that traders do not receive price or position feedback for a long time, which amounts to "blind trading," and the risks of self-trading are also quite apparent. However, we believe there is valuable potential to be explored here, and the design space is vast. Core Ideas Motivations Imagine a music fan discovering an unsigned artist destined for fame. This fan possesses valuable information but lacks connections with record labels; conversely, the record labels that could sign the artist are completely unaware of their existence. Similarly, a researcher may discover groundbreaking results related to autonomous driving hidden in an obscure paper, yet they lack the resources to commercialize it, while companies investing billions in R&D completely overlook the paper. This model appears repeatedly across various fields: shop owners spot trends before big brands, local suppliers discover potential businesses ahead of investors, and fans identify athletic talent before the general public. In each case, those on the front lines with deep contextual expertise hold information of immense value to those with resources to act. However, there is no mechanism to connect the two: those with information cannot monetize their insights, while those with resources miss opportunities. This article focuses on such opportunities: those requiring significant resources for evaluation and action, which are competitive and time-sensitive; thus, being aware of such opportunities sooner than others with the capacity to act can provide a significant advantage. Existing Mechanisms Scouting projects are a solution to the above situation. They offer specific groups with contextual knowledge a "small share of the profits from discovering opportunities." However, these projects are limited by trust requirements and assessment costs: the scale of organizations cannot exceed their ability to vet scouts and recommended content. Prediction markets are a proven way to aggregate information from broad, decentralized populations. However, there are incentive problems: if someone wants to make a huge profit by betting a particular artist will succeed, someone else must bear the corresponding loss. Market makers have no incentive to stake a large amount of money on an artist they've never heard of. Even if organizations subsidize market liquidity to obtain information, the prediction markets commonly available today tend to provide information as a "public good"—competitors can free-ride on these signals, ultimately eroding the advantage. This is precisely the core "information leakage" problem the Opportunity Market aims to solve. Mechanism Design Examples This concept is best explained through examples. Suppose a record label wants to leverage the Opportunity Market to create a decentralized scouting project. They create a series of private prediction markets with the proposition "Will we sign artist X in 2025?" where X can be any artist. Anyone can create new markets for artists not already listed and include them in this series. Here, "private" means that only the initiator (i.e., the record label) knows the market prices at any time. The record label acts as a market maker, providing up to $25,000 in liquidity for each market. They can commit to providing this level of liquidity or prove it in some way (e.g., by running an automated market maker in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)). The scouts can win the "indiscriminate funds" as long as they act early. As scouts grow more confident in a particular opportunity, they will buy more shares, driving the market price up. When the price of a particular opportunity rises, the initiator (the record label) will take notice and start investigating, potentially leading to signing the artist. If a deal is eventually made, the shares will be redeemed for profit, and the record label effectively pays up to $25,000 in incentives for the decentralized scouting. Privacy Protection For the Opportunity Market to function, it is essential that only the initiator can see the current prices. If traders can immediately see their order execution status, they could deduce market prices from trades. However, traders ultimately need to know their position. The solution is to set an "opportunity window" (e.g., two weeks), after which traders can learn whether their orders have been executed. This allows the initiator time to investigate potential opportunities before the information becomes public. After the window period ends, there are various design options: reveal all prices and positions; only disclose individual traders' personal positions; implement different rules for large and small orders, etc. More complex systems might allow "closing sell" or "closing buy" limit orders before positions are disclosed, or even permit trading agents to operate without revealing current positions. Market Design Details Liquidity Supply Markets can adopt either an automated market maker model or an order book model. Regardless, liquidity may be concentrated within specific ranges. For example, the initiator might start providing liquidity at a 1% probability level (below which information has no real value) and stop providing it at a 30% probability level (above which market signals have limited additional value). Unlimited Markets and "Top N" Markets For most types of opportunities (e.g., signing artists), the number of actions an initiator can take within a specific timeframe is limited. Therefore, if traders are willing to believe that the record label will honor payments, the company only needs to commit to...