BetRelease: The Prediction Market for AI Futures That Uses Fake Coins and Real Market Logic

An open-source Convex app that turns speculative release dates into a self-contained economy, with pool-based pricing, daily coin claims, and creator-run resolution.

8 min read • View on GitHub • More from Leonxlnx

A wide editorial scene shows an AI release board as a live market, with placards for future model names and hands pushing tokens across a tabletop. The image explains that BetRelease treats speculation about AI timelines like a public trading floor, not a financial exchange. — BetRelease turns future AI releases into something people can price, argue over, and settle like a market.

Key Takeaways

BetRelease turns AI release anxiety into a playable market board, and that shift is the project's real thesis.
Its economy feels credible because simple pool math, daily coin inflows, and a transaction ledger create consistent market physics.
The sharpest design choice is creator-run resolution, which trades oracle complexity for a social trust model.
Convex and React fit the product because realtime updates matter more here than heavy infrastructure.

BetRelease is easiest to read as a thesis about how people talk about AI. The repo seeds markets around future model releases, then lets users push prices with fake coins, so every bet reads like a public guess at the next frontier. That makes the app part prediction market, part time capsule.

The future is already on the board

The seed data is opinionated on purpose. Markets for GPT-6, Claude 5, and Gemini 4 turn the UI into a forecast wall, where each card quietly says what this community thinks the AI timeline looks like. The result is less a betting app than a catalog of assumptions about what will ship next.

A close-up view isolates a single market pool split into Yes and No sides, with coins flowing from a wallet into one side and a price needle moving as the pool fills. The image explains how a fake-money market can still produce meaningful price discovery through imbalance and liquidity. — A small pool can still behave like a market when every coin changes the balance.

How a fake-money market still behaves like a market

The core loop is simple enough to explain in one view: claim coins, place a bet, move the price, record the ledger.

The economy starts with a faucet. Users claim 50 coins every 24 hours, which keeps the board liquid without real deposits or outside funding. Bets then move coins into yes and no sides stored in the markets table, while the transactions ledger records every signup bonus, daily claim, wager, and payout.

The pricing logic is not an order book. It is closer to a simplified constant product market maker, where the current side's balance nudges the implied price as new coins arrive. That gives the UI a familiar market feel without the machinery of a full exchange.

const price = Math.max(0.05, Math.min(0.95, (currentSideCoins + amount / 2) / (totalCoins + amount)));
shares = Math.round(amount / price);

The creator resolves the truth

The smartest shortcut in BetRelease is also the most fragile. In convex/markets.ts, only the market creator can resolve the outcome, which replaces an external oracle with a person who already has context and skin in the game. That keeps the app simple, but it also makes trust part of the product.

That choice strips away the hardest part of prediction markets, then exposes the trade-off immediately. It works because BetRelease is about playful forecasting, not financial settlement, but it also means the social layer matters more than the protocol layer.

A medium-distance scene shows a creator at a desk stamping a resolve document while the market behind them freezes into a settled state. The image explains the creator-as-oracle model, where resolution is a deliberate human decision instead of an external data feed. — Resolution is a human act here, which makes the market feel intimate and a little precarious.

Why Convex fits the job

The backend is small because Convex carries the realtime burden. useQuery keeps balances, prices, and rankings in sync without a polling loop, while convex/auth.ts uses Web Crypto for password hashing instead of Node-only assumptions. That is exactly the kind of boring infrastructure a fake-money market wants.

The repo shape stays clean: schema, bets, markets, users, and seed logic live under convex/, while the front end sits in a single React app in src/App.jsx. Nothing here looks overbuilt, and that is the point. The app gets its energy from fast feedback, not from a complicated stack.

BetRelease is not Polymarket, and that is the point

Dimension	BetRelease	Polymarket	Manifold Markets
Stakes	Fake coins	Real money	Play money
Primary audience	AI timeline obsessives	General prediction traders	Broad community forecasters
Resolution	Market creator decides	External or verified event	Creator or community verdict
Liquidity model	Daily coin drip plus pool math	Market-driven liquidity	Community play-money economy
Product goal	Turn AI hype into a game	Trade on real-world outcomes	Practice forecasting and social signaling

Seen this way, BetRelease is not a smaller Polymarket. It is a different answer to the same impulse: turn uncertainty into something users can touch, manipulate, and talk about. In this repo, the speculation is the product.