Prediction-market & event-contract consulting
I design precise, client-specific event-contract specifications that give decision makers, reviewers, and serious market participants a clearer basis for high-stakes information markets.
Economics
Strong market specifications create value in two directions: they improve the quality of the information signal and reduce the cost of avoidable ambiguity.
Upside creation
Clear outcome boundaries, source hierarchy, fallback treatment, and timing rules reduce interpretation risk around a market question. That clarity can make serious participants more comfortable committing liquidity or attention, while helping the organization read the resulting information signal with fewer disputes and less noise.
Downside protection
A single ambiguous resolution path can undermine the value of a market, trigger disputes, and damage confidence among reviewers and market participants. Careful wording, source selection, and edge-case analysis reduce semantic arbitrage and help to produce cleaner decision-relevant data.
Fit & scope
A focused intake frame for serious prediction-market, event-contract, governance, and decision-support questions.
Outcomes
The deliverable is only part of the value. The work is also meant to help you review whether existing prediction-market coverage maps to your decision context, build a clearer review basis, and reason through market-design tradeoffs under uncertainty.
Existing prediction markets can be reviewed for fit, gaps, wording differences, source assumptions, and decision relevance so you can understand what the available markets do and do not answer for the decision context.
Clearer market wording, resolution criteria, source hierarchy, and edge-case handling help reduce ambiguity, resolution risk, edge-case disputes, weak review materials, and implementation uncertainty.
The engagement is meant to give you a personal partner for careful market-question reasoning, not a generic document generator or a detached template process.
You work with me directly. I personally review, adapt, and finalize the deliverable, and my name is tied to the judgment, care, and restraint behind the work.
I try my best to apply critical judgment to which questions should be asked, reframed, or avoided, while treating ongoing learning and discipline around prediction-market regulation and venue practice as part of the work. Legal and regulatory decisions stay with qualified counsel and the responsible organization.
I use AI-assisted tools where useful for research, drafting, comparison, and consistency checks, but the final output is human-led, manually reviewed, and verified against the project context.
Approach
Useful markets need judgment before wording: what should be asked, who may be affected, and how the answer will be resolved.
Useful governance and decision-support markets begin with judgment about which questions should be asked, which are worth asking a crowd, and which should be avoided because they create unacceptable moral, public-interest, or review concerns.
The person or group that frames a market question helps direct attention, define what counts as evidence, and shape incentives. That requires explicit judgment about who should be involved, who may be affected, and which ethical, stakeholder, and review checks are needed.
The goal is to help crowd judgment inform choices by a company, foundation, research organization, DAO, government body, public institution, or other society-facing initiative. At their best, prediction markets can bring many informed perspectives together on how important problems should be prioritized and acted on.
I turn vague event ideas, rough market drafts, or internally debated questions into precise event-contract specification drafts, or prepare non-transactional coverage reviews that identify fit, gaps, wording differences, source assumptions, timing rules, and resolution limits. I also consider whether a public prediction-market question is likely to attract enough participant interest to produce a meaningful information signal, and how it can be reframed without losing the underlying idea or decision context.
Offers
A complete architecture build starts at $12,500, with focused audits from $3,500 and ongoing advisory retainers from $6,500/month.
Most engagements follow a natural progression: many teams begin with a paid audit or a one-off architecture build, then move into an ongoing advisory relationship once market questions, reviews, and governance decisions become recurring rather than one-time. Each tier remains individualized consulting work performed under my personal responsibility. The prices shown are indicative starting points; I confirm scope and fit before accepting an engagement, and final fixed-price proposals follow a short scope clarification.
Step 1 · Entry
Paid initial diagnosis
from $3,500
Credited toward an architecture pack if you proceed within 60 days.
A focused, paid diagnosis for teams with a draft specification or market idea that needs an independent safety check before internal, governance, product, compliance, counsel, or venue review.
This is the qualifying entry step. It safeguards the intended information value of an existing market idea by identifying ambiguity, resolution gaps, edge cases, and wording choices that could produce disputes or misleading signals, and it shows whether the problem is serious and recurring enough to justify deeper work.
Typical output: A dispute-vector review identifying hidden loopholes, edge cases, source weaknesses, and resolution ambiguities, together with recommended wording patches and precise overrides for the client-specific specification.
Step 2 · Deep architecture
Complete specification build
from $12,500
Often a fraction of the decision it informs.
For organizations with a broad decision, general information need, vague prediction-market idea, or selected high-stakes event-contract question that needs a production-ready specification basis.
The work clarifies what should be asked, translates the decision context into one or more resolvable event-contract questions, and increases confidence by making the outcome structure, resolution sources, fallback logic, and edge-case handling explicit before high-stakes review or use. It can stand alone as a one-off capital project or become the foundation for an ongoing advisory relationship.
Typical output: A client-specific question-development memo where needed, recommended event-contract formulation, rationale for the chosen framing, event-contract blueprint, source hierarchy matrix, timing and fallback rules, edge-case resolution runbook, manipulation-surface notes, participant-restriction considerations, and open review questions.
Step 3 · Ongoing relationship
Ongoing risk reduction
VIP Access
from $6,500/month
Minimum monthly commitment.
For teams that repeatedly evaluate market questions and need ongoing outside review of market structure, source choices, and resolution criteria. Appropriate only where recurring review is genuinely expected.
The retainer continuously reduces decision and specification risk rather than simply offering more access. Pricing scales with four value drivers: how often new market questions arise, how costly a bad specification would be, how many reviewers must be convinced, and how much priority and fast turnaround are worth.
Typical output: Priority advisory access, a defined number of specification reviews per month, agreed response windows, a quarterly review of your question portfolio, recurring written specification notes, and support preparing governance and counsel discussions for a defined set of client-specific market questions. Full architectural rebuilds, broad legal or regulatory work, and unrelated product or trading questions remain separately scoped.
Proof of method
I am early in offering this service, so I do not lean on logos or testimonials. Instead, the structural discipline behind my specifications is visible in an open-source specification project I develop and maintain in the open: event-contract-builder. It encodes the same checks I apply by hand, so you can read exactly how I reason about specification structure before you ever send an inquiry.
Product names and resolution statements are rendered from structured fields, so the trader-facing wording cannot quietly drift from the agreed terms.
Each contract is checked against the activity categories that matter for venue and counsel review, with the analysis written down rather than assumed.
Primary sources, revision policy, and fallback logic are made explicit, so resolution does not depend on an unstated assumption about where the answer comes from.
Ambiguous, late, and failure scenarios get written resolution rules in advance, before they become disputes after the fact.
Manipulation surface, information asymmetry, and source robustness are assessed deliberately instead of being hand-waved.
Draft disclaimers, open questions for counsel, and review references are structured so legal and compliance reviewers have something concrete to react to.
The project is public for transparency, not a product you operate. Your deliverables remain personal, client-specific specification documents prepared and reviewed by me. The open code simply lets you verify the rigor and structure behind that work in advance.
FAQ
Business, institutional, research, and governance teams with a concrete forecasting, governance, or event-contract question. Typical projects involve reviewing existing public market coverage, improving an existing specification, or preparing a new specification draft before internal, counsel, compliance, governance, venue, or stakeholder review.
No. I focus on B2B, institutional, research, and governance contexts. I do not handle casual betting, personal trading questions, or consumer inquiries.
Not necessarily. Some teams already have reviewers; others use the work to decide whether a market idea deserves product work, governance discussion, external counsel, or a more formal review process.
Internal teams know the product and stakeholder context, but they can also be too close to the project to see logical gaps, source weaknesses, or edge cases clearly. I provide independent, non-transactional review with specialized depth around manipulation surface, resolution-source hierarchy, ambiguity, and market-definition structure. The result is a clearer review basis for internal product, governance, legal, compliance, or venue teams to react to instead of starting from a rough idea or informal draft.
A tailored specification draft, specification review, or existing-market coverage review. The output usually covers the market question, Yes/No/Invalid criteria where relevant, resolution sources, timing rules, edge cases, fit/gaps, and open review questions. I usually deliver a polished PDF and, when useful, an editable Markdown version.
Because the market does not exist yet, there is no trading volume or realized outcome to point to. The reference point is the size of the decision the market is meant to inform, which your team can estimate. A precise specification is what makes the resulting signal trustworthy enough to act on, so I set a fixed fee as a small fraction of that decision. I do not price on a share of outcomes and do not take success or contingency fees.
No. Think of my role as closer to an architect for the market specification: I design the blueprint, test the outcome logic, clarify the resolution criteria, and identify where the structure may fail under edge cases or manipulation attempts. Your legal counsel, compliance team, venue reviewers, or regulators remain the inspectors. They provide any final legal, regulatory, listing, filing, or approval judgment based on their own review.
No. AI may support research, drafting, comparison, and consistency checks, but it does not replace my professional judgment. I decide which questions should be specified, reframed, or avoided; verify the output against the project context; and manually review the final deliverable. You get a personal partner for reasoning through uncertainty, not a detached template or generic document generator.
Pricing & process
What you pay for is the economic value at stake: cleaner decision data, reduced resolution ambiguity, fewer preventable disputes, and a stronger basis for review by stakeholders, counsel, compliance teams, governance groups, or venue operators.
The reference point is the size of the decision the market is built to inform — a figure your own team can estimate. A fixed fee set as a small fraction of that decision is easy to justify, because a market you cannot trust is a decision you cannot make.
Illustrative, hypothetical
A company must decide whether to commit $3M to a new product line, with real uncertainty about whether it will reach the adoption that makes the investment worthwhile. Instead of deciding on internal opinion alone, they run a conditional event contract — “If we launch Product Line X in 2027, will it reach $4M in revenue by the end of 2028?” — alongside the realistic alternative use of that capital. The market price becomes an incentive-weighted, continuously updated probability they can put in front of their board. A low price helps them step back from a costly commitment; a high price lets them proceed with more confidence.
For that signal to be worth acting on, the contract has to be unambiguous: exactly what counts as “revenue,” from which system, over which window, how it resolves if the launch slips or is only partial, and what voids it. That precision is the specification work — and it is what turns a $3M guess into a question the market can actually answer. Seen this way, the fee is small relative to the decision the market informs.
I do not promise that a market will be accurate or that a decision will turn out well; those depend on the crowd, the data, and choices that remain yours. What I provide is the precondition: a question and resolution structure precise enough that the resulting signal is worth acting on.
The fee is small next to the costs a single ambiguous market question can create. Careful specification is meant to head off:
Email inquiry
Scope clarification
Individual fixed-price proposal
Specification work
Review round
Each project is scoped individually. The proposal depends on outcome complexity, resolution ambiguity, review context, stakeholder context, existing-market coverage, and the desired depth of the deliverable.
After an initial scope clarification, I provide an individual proposal for the work. The project is defined around the relevant market question or set of related questions, the intended review audience, and whether the work requires a new specification draft, an existing-market coverage review, or both.
Projects are fixed-scope. If a deliverable materially misses the agreed written scope, I correct it or refund the affected fee as agreed in the proposal.
The engagement covers the agreed specification output. Later legal, regulatory, listing, trading, revenue, governance, investment, or market outcomes remain outside the scope of the consulting project.
About
I am Christopher Maximilian Altmann, a German independent consultant focused on prediction-market and event-contract specification. I bring a systems-design discipline to the work: define the system boundary, identify failure modes, test assumptions, and make ambiguous cases explicit before they become resolution problems. I work personally with you to reason through outcome definitions, resolution criteria, source reliability, existing-market coverage, and edge cases. Each deliverable is personally reviewed, adapted, and finalized by me. Because the specification framing is prepared under my name, my professional reputation is tied to the judgment, care, and restraint behind the work.
My motivation is to help prediction markets become more varied, more carefully specified, and more useful as information tools. Well-defined markets can make uncertainty easier to inspect, help separate signal from noise, and support more disciplined public and organizational reasoning. Poorly defined markets can do the opposite: create ambiguity, resolution disputes, and misplaced confidence.
I bring a personal moral compass to this work. I care about using prediction markets and event contracts in ways that can support better decisions, more responsible institutions, and, in a small but real way, a better world for everyone. That does not mean I always get every judgment right. It means I try to make my assumptions explicit, keep learning, and treat the social consequences of market questions as part of the work rather than as an afterthought.
I am especially interested in prediction markets and adjacent forecasting processes as mechanisms for disciplined decision support, including Futarchy in decentralized autonomous organizations and other governance contexts. I also see carefully designed event contracts as a way to direct attention toward important scientific, technical, and social questions. For these uses to be credible, the market question, resolution method, source hierarchy, and participant restrictions need to be precise enough for product, research, operations, governance, compliance, and counsel review.
I also try to maintain a self-development and growth mindset around the field. Prediction-market regulation, venue practice, CFTC-facing event-contract review, AI-assisted drafting, and governance use cases continue to change. I do not present that learning as legal or regulatory advice, but I do treat it as part of the work ethic required to prepare useful, current, human-verified specification materials.
Disclaimers
I provide technical, conceptual, and specification-oriented consulting only. I do not operate prediction markets, hold client funds, intermediate financial products, accept wagers, provide legal advice, or provide regulatory assessments. My work is limited to technical, conceptual, and specification-oriented services.
My work does not include legal opinions, regulatory representation, CFTC compliance determinations, self-certifications, approval requests, final CFTC filing documents, or recommendations to trade any contract or financial product. I do not recommend trades, allocations, position sizes, or whether anyone should buy, sell, hold, use, or avoid any particular market. A consulting project begins only after scope and terms have been agreed.
Contact
If your organization is weighing a prediction-market idea, existing-market coverage question, or event-contract specification need, email me with the decision context, the draft or market idea, and the audience that would review the work.
Regular email is fine for ordinary inquiries. For sensitive messages, you can use my public PGP key and verify it with the fingerprint below.
Fingerprint
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