We built Rumour.app because in crypto, the future doesn’t arrive as a press release. It arrives as a hint, a commit message at midnight, an offhand remark on a stage, a wallet that wakes up and moves with intent. By the time the “official announcement” lands, the edge has already been arbitraged away. We wanted to give serious participants a way to act on narratives while they are still congealing, without turning markets into a casino of hearsay. That meant taking the most human part of marketsthe stories we tell each otherand engineering it with accountability, structure, and skin in the game.
Rumour.app is the first marketplace built explicitly for narratives in formation. It transforms unconfirmed signals into tradable, auditable instruments so traders can be early and still be responsible.
Why rumors deserve a real market
For years I watched smart researchers do everything right and still lose to latency. They built models, they tracked on-chain flows, they wrote crisp reports. Then a credible account hinted at a partnership, a DAO telegraphed a pivot, or a policy rumor started vibrating through chatsand price moved first. The tools to price uncertainty didn’t exist. You could either buy the asset and pray the rumor was real, ignore it and watch the opportunity pass, or chase confirmation and arrive with the crowd. None of these options rewarded disciplined risk management.
We built Rumour.app to give uncertainty a shape. When the claim is still forming, we timestamp it. When sources corroborate, we quantify it. When the story gathers energy, we let you express a view on the narrative itself instead of taking blunt exposure to the underlying asset. That’s not about glorifying speculation; it’s about removing guesswork from the part of the market everyone already plays.
Turning whispers into data
The core idea is simple: every rumor is a claim about reality arriving in the future. We treat each claim as a data object with provenance, structure, and risk.
Provenance: Where did this claim originate? A public post, a conference talk, a code repo, a governance draft, an on-chain action? We record source, timestamp, and cryptographic proofs where available, and we anchor a hash of the claim in a verifiable registry so history can’t be rewritten.
Structure: We normalize every claim into a schema: subject, predicate, time window, and verifiable conditions. “Project X will mainnet-launch by March” becomes a structured object with a clear path to truth. That lets us build objective settlement conditions up front, instead of retrofitting them later.
Risk: We compute a living Rumour Score that reflects source reputation, corroboration density, semantic similarity to past claims, and on-chain telemetry drift. The score isn’t a crystal ball; it’s a continuously updating risk surface that instructs how markets should price the claim as evidence changes.
The point is not to declare truth. The point is to make uncertainty legible enough to trade and hedge.
Narrative markets, not just prediction markets
Traditional prediction markets are binary and slow. You place a bet and wait months for resolution. That’s not where the trading edge lives. Rumour.app introduces Narrative Markets designed for the volatile window when information is forming and flowing.
Time-bounded contracts let you go long or short on a specific claim inside its verification window. Prices move with the Rumour Score, order flow, and liquidity depth.
Narrative baskets group related claims into a theme, like “modular rollup alliances this quarter” or “stablecoin policy shifts this month.” If you believe the theme is right but individual claims are noisy, you can take exposure to the basket and hedge idiosyncratic risk.
Dynamic margin and circuit breakers modulate leverage as correlation spikes. When multiple related claims light up, the system tightens risk automatically rather than rewarding reckless piling on.
Reputation-linked fees reward accurate signalers and impose a real cost on misleading claims. Stake your reputation to validate a claim’s framing and you earn share of fees if the claim tracks reality; mislead consistently and your fee tier worsens and your staked reputation decays.
This is a market where incentives push toward context, not clickbait.
Architecture you can trust
To feel fast and still be verifiable, Rumour.app uses a layered approach. A low-latency execution environment handles order matching and score updates so the interface reacts in real time. A settlement layer batches state commitments, anchoring them to a high-security environment. Data ingestion runs through an auditable pipeline: curated off-chain feeds and on-chain telemetry flow into models whose weights, inputs, and change logs are transparent. If you disagree with our priors, you can fork your own weighting via API and trade against your custom view.
We designed the system so traders can independently verify the trail from source to score to price. Every claim exposes its provenance graph and its “truth path”the objective conditions that will mark resolution. Every market exposes its risk parameters and its current margin profile. No hidden switches, no black-box magic.
What using it feels like
Open the app and you’re not dumped into a firehose of posts. You see a narrative mapclusters of claims forming around protocols, sectors, and themes. Nodes swell as corroboration grows. Heat blooms where liquidity accumulates. Click a node and you get the full dossier: sources, timestamps, Rumour Score components, truth path, open interest, and the best available hedges. From there, you can trade the claim, provide basket liquidity, or subscribe to the surface so you’re alerted as fresh evidence lands.
We intentionally built for different rhythms of participation. If you’re a high-frequency discretionary trader, the low-latency view and streaming score deltas are your tools. If you’re research-led, the dossier and the curation layer are home: build a public narrative surface, earn routing fees when your surface drives volume, and stake your reputation on the dossier’s quality.
Ethics and edge can coexist
Markets already trade on stories; they just do it in DMs and group chats. The ethical failure isn’t that people act on early informationit’s that they do so without accountability or shared context. Rumour.app is built to reduce harm:
Accountability by design: Claims are immutable once posted. Edits create new versions with links to the old. Reputation is earned and can be lost.
Skin in the game: Signalers who consistently surface accurate context get better fees and more routing. Those who mislead are penalized. There is no free clout.
Transparency: The components of the Rumour Score are visible. You can see how much weight a model placed on corroboration versus source history, and you can contest the weighting with your own.
Edge comes from better inference on shared data, not from hoarding the data itself.
What surprised us building this
The hardest part wasn’t building the math; it was engineering incentives that bend behavior toward honesty. We iterated on slashing curves for months. Too soft and bad actors linger; too sharp and honest early calls get punished. We tuned decay so reputations fade without activity, and we added “relational accuracy”were you not just right, but consistently aligned with other accurate signalers? That prevents a single lucky call from conferring permanent influence.
We also learned that visualizing narratives matters as much as pricing them. Traders are pattern recognizers. The narrative map turned out to be a decision tool in its own right: when two distant clusters start quietly converging, you can feel a sectoral rotation before the chart shows it.
The road ahead
Deeper reputation graphs: Beyond individual sources, we’re modeling communities of accuracy—ensembles that, when they align, are meaningfully predictive.
Cross-venue hedging: One-click links to perps and options so you can express a view on the narrative while hedging the underlying asset, without juggling terminals.
Open curation markets: Community-maintained narrative surfaces with fee-sharing. Think of them as living research pages where the best curators are compensated by the flows they help inform.
Programmatic access: Streaming score deltas, webhooks for provenance events, and backtesting endpoints so funds can stress-test their strategies on historical narrative dynamics.
Compliance-primitive tooling: Clear resolution conditions, immutable claim registries, and transparent settlement rules designed to make audit and oversight easier, not harder.
The big dream
Crypto’s next advantage won’t be faster blocks; it will be coordination intelligencesystems that help groups perceive weak signals sooner and act together with fewer blind spots. Rumour.app is a step toward that future. When a network’s narrative surface becomes legible, builders can communicate roadmap intent without playing coy, researchers can demonstrate value in real time, and traders can price uncertainty with craft instead of superstition.
Imagine a world where a team previews a possible pivot by posting a properly structured claim with clear conditions. The market digests it, assigns a price to the uncertainty, and provides hedges to those who need protection. When the future arrives, settlement is automatic and the narrative record becomes part of the project’s public memory. That is a healthier way to learn together, to fund risk, and to direct attention.
A closing invitation
We didn’t create Rumour.app to celebrate gossip. We created it to dignify the part of markets that has always lived in the shadows. Stories move price. That won’t change. What can change is the venue: from backchannel to shared surface, from vibes to verifiability, from zero-sum rumor chasing to structured, hedgeable, collectively intelligible risk.