Authensus

Radical Authenticity

Welcome to Authensus, the world's first oracle-free prediction market for content authenticity.

The Truth Crisis

Legacy media lacks accountability, and AI slop poisons our feeds. Centralised solutions are just new black boxes telling us what to believe. We recognise your concern—it's difficult to believe we have a say in truth anymore.

Human-First Consensus

Authensus emphasizes conversation and evolving consensus. Built on the lightning-fast Solana blockchain, we provide a truly democratic platform where status has no bearing on your say in the conversation.

Oracle-Free Resolution

Pioneering total self-containment, Authensus requires no external oracles for market resolution. It is a true court of public opinion, governed by its participants.

So… Let's begin
To the Markets

How Does It Work?

The Concept

Authensus markets use a combination betting-and-voting mechanism to determine consensus around authenticity while allowing users to earn, without relying on external oracles.

Asset Creation

An asset is created from the tokenisation of a piece of content. At this time, a market timeout is set.

Betting and Voting Phase

Markets open for betting and voting. Anyone can place SOL bets for or against specific facets of authenticity until the timeout is reached. Users can also cast votes using Voting Tokens. You'll get only one vote per market, but can redeem as many tokens as you like in a single vote.

Vote Counting Phase

A 48-hour vote counting window opens. Users who have committed to votes have their tokens cast accordingly, and their votes are revealed.

Consolidation

The winning side is determined by vote consensus. If you bet/voted on the losing side, you lose your stake.

Payouts

Winners on the correct side get paid: Voters get paid out 1:1 in SOL. Bettors get a SOL refund + winnings in Voting Tokens (from the losing side's pot).

The Cycle Continues

Markets are re-initialised. Users can restart the process for new rounds. Truth is an ongoing process.

Frequently Asked Questions

Content can be uploaded to Authensus and 'Authensised'. This creates an asset on-chain, as well as markets and their timeout, which is set at upload time. This is currently performed only by Authensus. If you find something you'd like to see on the platform, make a request to @authensus on X.
Facets are the categories into which Authensus has divided the aspects of content authenticity. Any piece of content can have a set of markets created around it in which users can participate. Since authenticity means something different from one piece of content to another, some Facets make sense for a piece and others don't. We provide the following eight Facets from which market creators can choose:
authority:Is the author an authority on the matter?
transparency:Is the content presented transparently, without obstruction?
earnestness:Is the content presented in earnest or performatively?
interactivity:Is there room for discourse around the content?
truthfulness:Is the content truthful or baseless?
comprehensiveness:Is the content comprehensive or is it looking at the subject myopically?
originality:Is the content original or contrived/plagiarised?
anthropogenicity:Is the content made organically (by a human) or synthetically (by a machine)?
To earn SOL on Authensus, you need to redeem Voting Tokens by placing votes with the consensus in markets. Voting Tokens are won by winning in betting markets. Authensus requires users to take part in both betting and voting to make profit.
Voters win back their vote amounts 1:1 in SOL. Bettors receive back their SOL bets, plus winnings paid out in Voting Tokens. The winnings are taken from the total amount of bets placed on the losing side of the market. Winnings are distributed in proportion to the amount bet on the winning side. If your bet was 5% of the total on the winning side, you get 5% of the winnings.
Voting Tokens can only be used in the Authensus voting mechanism. There is no way of transferring them to others, nor can they be sold on exchanges.
The minimum allowed bet is 0.001 SOL. The minimum allowed vote amount is 0.001 Voting Tokens, and the maximum is 100 Voting Tokens.
You can place bets on any market of any asset for which you are not the author. If you are the author of an asset, then you can only bet in favour of any of its markets, and not against. You also cannot place a bet in a market in which you have already placed an Underdog Bet.
There are more restrictions on voting than on betting. You cannot place votes on any market of an asset for which you are the author. You cannot place a vote in a market in which you have an active bet. To prevent coordinated attacks on the voting mechanism, only a random set of voting markets will be available to you at any one time. The number of such markets is determined by a Voting Modulus set as a governance parameter. The current value of the Voting Modulus is 1, which means that on average about 100% of markets in the voting phase will be available to you.
The Underdog Bet allows a user to place bets on both sides of a market, but with higher favour on the less popular side. The direction in which you move the slider to place the bet does not make a difference, as Authensus only uses the magnitude of the bet to place it. Once the betting state is over, your Underdog Bet is divided between the two sides of the wager market in inverse proportion to the normal bets placed by all of the other users. The bet is blind, so not only can you not see what other users have done, but you do not know what the split of your bet will be. You cannot place an underdog bet if you already have an active bet, or if you are the author of the asset.
Authensus has been designed in such a way as to incentivise users to place votes on authenticity in an honest way, without holding onto voting tokens for too long. If you win a bet, we don't want you to run off immediatley! We still want you to vote honestly. So if you win a bet, you'll get your wager back, but to redeem extra winnings, we require you to place votes with the consensus.
Betting is the mechanism by which Voting Tokens can be minted to users. In the act of placing a bet, you are showing your risk appetite for taking part in the market. Furthermore, since voting tokens are exchangeable for SOL at 1:1, simply buying voting tokens would be no different than casting votes with SOL.
Coordinated attacks on the voting mechanism are mitigated in a number of ways, including randomisation of the votability of markets, not allowing authors to take part in voting, ensuring that only one vote can be cast per market per voter, and ensuring that voting tokens cannot be transferred to anyone other than Authensus. The voteing mechanism is also blinded with a commit-reveal scheme such that the voting favourites cannot be known until reveal time.
If Voting Tokens can only be won by successful bets, and bets can only be successful if there are votes cast in their favour, then there cannot be any Voting Tokens to start the system. Thus to start off with, there is a Voting Token Vendor available, with which users can buy Voting Tokens with SOL at 1:1. Once there are enough users in the system with Voting Tokens, the Vendor will be turned off.
A new round is started any time a bet is placed in an initialised market. Betting takes place, then voting, after which the market is consolidated and re-initialised. Markets continue to exist in perpetuity, and (re-)initialised markets can be (re)started at any time. The idea behind this is that truth is an ongoing process.
In the case of a tie, everyone gets back their SOL bet or Voting Tokens. No winnings are paid out.