This document is the standard itself. A company that signs it accepts every directive below as a description of how it already operates or how it commits to operate: publicly, and with the list of signatories open for anyone to check.
Prediction markets are the first financial instrument most of their users will ever touch. They arrive as an app, priced in cents, framed by headlines, and they settle in absolutes.
That combination is not a problem in itself. It becomes one when a venue grows faster than its users' understanding of it, and faster than its own ability to explain, resolve and defend the contracts it lists. Every category that has been through this (retail brokerage, spread betting, crypto exchange) learned the same lesson late and expensively: the market that survives regulation is the one that was already behaving as if regulation had arrived.
This Manifest is written by operators, not regulators. It sets the floor we think the category needs before someone sets a lower one for us.
Resolution rules are published before a market opens and are not revised while money is at risk. A contract whose terms can move after the fact is not a contract; it is a discretionary payout.
Where a rule proves ambiguous, the ambiguity is resolved in public, with the reasoning, the source consulted, and the decision recorded where any user can read it. Signatories accept that being seen to resolve badly is less damaging than resolving quietly.
Fees, spreads, settlement sources, custody arrangements and conflicts of interest are stated in plain language on the surface where the trade happens, not in a policy page reachable in four clicks.
If a signatory takes the other side of its users' trades, provides liquidity, or profits from spread rather than commission, it says so. Users are entitled to know who they are trading against.
Deposit limits, cool-off periods and self-exclusion are product features, built into the account, not concessions granted by support staff on request.
Protection tooling is tested for the moment it matters: mid-session, after a loss, on mobile. A limit that takes three days to activate is a marketing claim, not a safeguard.
A first-time user learns what a price means, how a spread costs them money and how their market resolves before they learn how to deposit faster. Onboarding that optimises only for funded accounts is optimising for churn.
Signatories carry independent educational material, ours or their own, freely available, without a signup wall and without a trade prompt attached to it.
Standards are set against the jurisdiction that regulates next, not only the one that has not yet. A venue built to the minimum of its friendliest market is one ruling away from rebuilding under pressure.
Signatories maintain records, complaint handling and reporting that would survive supervision, and treat an approach from a regulator as correspondence, not crisis.
Revenue is expected to come from many informed participants over years, not a few ruined ones over months. The signatory measures its business accordingly and is willing to show which of the two it is.
A user who stops trading because they understood the risk is a success, not lost revenue. Signatories do not run retention campaigns designed to reverse that decision.
Signing is free, public and revocable. There is no audit, no certification fee and no tier. There is a list, and your company is either on it or it is not, which is the only enforcement a young industry can honestly claim.
What signing does, and what it deliberately does not do.
No. It is a public commitment, not a contract. Its force is reputational: the register is public, and so is any removal from it.
It was drafted by responsiblo and shaped with operators in the category: platforms, terminals and data providers who signed early.
Yes. It is versioned, and members are notified before a revised version takes effect. Nobody is silently bound to text they never read.
The case is reviewed. Where a company is clearly acting against the standard, it is removed from the register and loses the right to use the member mark.