By Stips · Updated
Stips is a prediction market you play with friends. Every market is a single Yes/No question about something that has not happened yet, and the price of Yes is the crowd’s answer, quoted in cents.
Most arguments about the future end without a score. Someone says a fight will be announced by Friday, someone else says it will not, and a week later nobody remembers who was right. A prediction market fixes that by making the disagreement concrete: you take a side at a price, the event happens, and the record is kept.
The price is the interesting part. If Yes is trading at 67¢, the people putting credits behind their opinion collectively think there is roughly a 67% chance. As people trade, the price moves, so a market is a live reading of what a group believes rather than a single loud opinion.
Every account starts with $500 in credits. There is no card, no deposit, no withdrawal, and no way to convert credits into currency. That is a deliberate design decision, not a stage we are waiting to grow out of.
Real-money betting changes what a market is for. It brings licensing, age verification, geographic restrictions, and a duty of care that a small product cannot honestly discharge. It also changes who plays and why. Stips is built for the argument, not the stake — the reward for being right is that the record shows you were right.
This also means Stips is not a gambling site and should not be described as one. If you are looking to bet money on events, this is not that.
Anyone can write a market. A good one asks a single question with an unambiguous answer and a stated deadline — "will X be officially announced by 9 August" rather than "will X be good". When you create a market you stake credits on your own side, and that stake sets the opening price.
Some markets are drafted automatically from current news and then published, which is why the board has fresh questions about fights, world affairs, economics and gaming without anyone hand-writing each one. Those are labelled so you can tell them apart from markets people wrote themselves.
Each market has a close time. After it closes, it resolves against public evidence — an official announcement, a published result, a primary source. Positions on the winning side are paid automatically and positions on the losing side pay nothing.
Resolution criteria are written on the market page before you trade, so you can see what will settle the question before you take a side. If a market is ambiguous, that is a flaw in the question, and the fix is a better question rather than a judgement call after the fact.
Stips is made by Barsky Design, a one-person product and design studio run by Hiram Barsky. It is an independent project rather than a company with a support desk.
If a market resolved wrongly, a price looks broken, or something is plainly a bug, email hbarsky01@gmail.com. Reports about specific markets are more useful than general ones — include the link.