Author: Gougoubi Labs
Compiled by: SONG DOGE
In recent years, prediction markets have been repeatedly touted in the crypto context as "more honest polls" and "more efficient information aggregators." However, a closer look reveals that most prediction markets are not truly "market-oriented," but rather resemble event contracts packaged by platforms: the platform decides which topics can be listed, how they are categorized, when settlements are made, which oracles are used, and who arbitrates. The trading interface is highly decentralized, but the governance structure is highly centralized. Thus, prediction markets have remained merely "usable financial products" rather than becoming "reusable information infrastructure."
This is the fundamental contradiction of prediction markets today: they claim to produce public probabilities, yet rely on a minority to define what is worth predicting, who is qualified to submit facts, and how disputes are adjudicated. Consequently, the larger the market, the more it tends towards stronger centralized barriers: stricter listing reviews, a more narrow range of topics, a more order book-based trading experience, and more "corporate" risk control. These are certainly effective, but this approach will not elevate prediction markets to a "social governance mechanism"; it will only solidify them into another category of derivative products.
Gougoubi's ambition is not to make the prediction market more like Polymarket, but to transform the prediction market from a "product" into a "protocol".
Its core assumption is that what truly determines the upper limit of the prediction market is not the matching efficiency, but who is making the oracles, how the oracles are constrained, and how disputes are socialized. In other words, the value of the prediction market lies not in "you can place bets," but in "you can make facts confirmed by the group without intermediaries."
In Gougoubi's design, prediction is not content provision for the platform, but rather a sovereign expression of the community. Everyone can create their own prediction track and build their own community from there. This community is not a "chat group," but an on-chain organization focused on consensus and dissemination: each prediction is governed by the organization, and each condition is treated as a callable "conditional oracle." This means the prediction market is no longer confined to centralized categories like sports, games, or politics; it can be broken down to your daily work, life, industry judgments, and process decisions, forming a highly granular "production line of social facts." The information explosion is not noise, but rather allows professional knowledge from different fields to be expressed in a market-driven manner, ultimately becoming settlementable and reusable.
For this to work, the "oracle" must be transformed from a single-point service into a social process. Gougoubi's key innovation is to break down the entire process into a governable state machine, and to ensure that each key step is driven by community decision-making, rather than relying on an always-correct "external authority".
The state transition you described is essentially a model of "low-friction optimistic governance + strong-constraint final review": conditions are first created, then activated by committee vote; after activation, the market opens for trading and liquidity; upon expiration, the leader submits the results to enter RESOLVED; then it enters the committee settlement vote and two rounds of backstop mechanism; if settlement consensus is difficult to reach, it enters EXCEPTIONAL; if the settlement is initially approved, it enters DISPUTED and opens a 24-hour dispute window, where anyone can initiate a dispute with collateral and evidence; finally, it is arbitrated by the highest committee, or in the event of timeout, it is forcibly settled as DRAW to ensure that the system does not freeze.
The significance of this design lies not in its "greater complexity," but in its transformation of the occurrence of facts into a public process that is accountable, challenging, and terminateable: quick settlement without controversy, and making the conflict explicit and correcting it through economic penalties if there is controversy.
It shares similarities with UMA (optimistic oracles, dispute windows, dispute staking, final arbitration), but Gougoubi attempts to create a variant that is "more decentralized but less frictional than UMA": Decentralization is reflected in two aspects—first, disputes no longer rely on the passive participation of a few "default voters," but instead bring participation rights forward into the community structure through committee governance and challenge windows; second, final arbitration is not an abstract "voting system," but is bound to the powers and responsibilities of the committee and the supreme committee, and introduces Leader penalties and dispute party penalties, so that errors are not "accidents where no one votes," but "costs that will be settled."
Low friction is reflected in three aspects: First, the non-controversial path is as short as possible: activation—transaction—submission—voting—automatic settlement; Second, two rounds of voting and EXCEPTIONAL are used as a fallback to reduce indefinite delays; Third, timeout DRAW ensures that the system is always convergent, avoiding governance paralysis caused by "forever waiting for an outsider to vote".
On the trading front, Gougoubi deliberately differentiates itself from the traditional "platform-based market making" model: it designs two models—stable LPs and risky LPs. Stable LPs do not participate in the final profit and loss distribution, only earning transaction fees and having limited exit options; risky LPs participate in the outcome distribution but cannot exit, sharing the profits and losses with the winners. Its philosophy is very clear: the value of liquidity providers is to "provide depth and reduce slippage," and they should not be forced to bear the asset wear and tear caused by trading paths; participating in settlement is an active choice to bear outcome risk in exchange for higher long-term returns. This allows the market to have two capital preferences from the outset: stable funds that prefer "infrastructure returns" and risky funds that prefer "opinion returns." More importantly, it removes "depth" from centralized market makers and returns it to community members.
If traditional prediction markets are more like "event casinos on a platform," then Gougoubi is closer to a "decentralized real-world governance system." It doesn't reform a particular trading interface, but rather the three underlying norms of prediction markets.
The first principle is that "facts must be governable." Traditional prediction markets outsource facts to oracle services or platform adjudication; Gougoubi transforms facts into an internal organizational process state. Facts are no longer just an answer, but a traceable on-chain history: who activated, who submitted, who voted, who challenged, who arbitrated, who was punished, and when timeouts occurred. Facts shift from "believing in an authority" to "accepting an auditable procedure."
The second principle is that "disputes must be priced." In many systems, disputes represent product risk, customer service costs, and compliance burdens; in Gougoubi, disputes are a core function of the mechanism. This is because many real-world problems are not purely objective price adjustments, but rather judgments with semantics, boundaries, and interpretive space. Making disputes explicit and constraining them with staking, penalties, and time windows transforms "social conflict" into a "resolvable economic process." This is a financialized expression that is closer to real-world governance.
The third principle is that "predictions must be reusable." Most prediction markets only serve bettors; Gougoubi attempts to make each condition a callable oracle, allowing all prediction markets and applications to consume these "conditional outcomes." When conditions can be reused, prediction markets are no longer just trading venues, but become an open public interface: DAOs can use it to propose KPI bindings and execution conditions, DeFi can use it for risk parameters and dynamic collateralization, and even the embodied robot training you mentioned can use "human society's judgment of the outcome" as an external signal source for action strategies—not letting AI guess boundaries by stacking computing power, but letting it learn to act within social consensus, converge in controversy, and make risk-controlled decisions in uncertainty.
This is also where Gougoubi's most philosophical aspect lies: it elevates "prediction" from a money-making skill to a governance method. Human society will inevitably produce outcomes: policy implementation, project success or failure, market direction, collective sentiment, technological routes, and ethical boundaries. Entrusting these "outcomes" to a few centralized entities for adjudication may be more efficient, but at the cost of a non-reusable trust structure; entrusting them to a completely random public opinion field will lead to noise and distortion. Prediction markets offer a third way: expressing cognition through prices, constraining disputes through mechanisms, and producing facts through organization.
Therefore, if Gougoubi succeeds, the trend it brings will not just be "yet another prediction market," but a return to prediction markets as a form of social infrastructure: it can transcend the significance of the stock market and the cryptocurrency market, not because it consumes more trading volume, but because it begins to assume a more fundamental function—transforming the scattered tacit knowledge of the world into a public truth that can be settled, traced, and reused. The truth no longer belongs to the platform, nor to any particular oracle service provider, but to the group of people willing to jointly safeguard it with rules, costs, and time. Gougoubi attempts to enshrine this in its protocol, making "truth belongs to the community" not just a slogan, but a working on-chain process.
