Fast-Forward
Phase 1. Blocked on Solidity hire + legal entity.
Fast-Forward is an ERC-4626 vault that buys prediction market positions from traders who want to exit before resolution, at a reputation- and execution-adjusted discount, and holds them to maturity. Bet365-style cash-out for Polymarket and Kalshi.
Why it works
Section titled “Why it works”The Vega Wedge
Section titled “The Vega Wedge”PM-based binary-outcome products are structurally cheaper than derivatives. The pricing wedge is real, quantified, and decays predictably over contract lifetime.
- λ = 0.176 on Polymarket (Yang 2026, N=291K contracts, 6 platforms). Pooled cross-platform λ = 0.183.
- Economic magnitude: at true probability 10%, market price averages ~13.5% (35% overpricing). At 50%, market price averages ~57%.
- Decays with lifetime. Half-life = 33% of contract duration. Duration-stratified: 2–6 hour contracts λ=0.078; >7-day contracts λ=0.444.
- Volume-stratified: >$10K contracts have λ ≈ 0. The wedge is driven by illiquid markets — exactly where an early-exit vault adds value.
- Play-money sign reversal: Manifold has λ = −0.218 (overconfidence without risk-bearing). The wedge has a genuine risk-bearing component on real-money venues.
- Variance risk premium = 93% of the structural cost gap (Lauris 2026, “Seeing Like a Market”).
Skill as vault alpha
Section titled “Skill as vault alpha”If Chrono Score captures forecasting skill, the vault compounds on asymmetric information. If it doesn’t, the vault still captures the pricing wedge.
- Top 3% of wallets take all $228M net profit (Yang 2026).
- Top 1% capture 84% of gains (Akey 2026).
- Edge decays monotonically with participant size (Deleep 2026) — conviction-driven whales are the source of vault alpha, not the destination.
The liquidity gap
Section titled “The liquidity gap”LPs on prediction markets structurally resemble underwriters (Palumbo 2026) — they carry unhedgeable terminal exposure with no hedging venue. Bet365 and Betfair charge 5–15% to cash out sports bets early. That spread is a proven business.
Pricing (v0)
Section titled “Pricing (v0)”offer_price = wang_corrected_midpoint(market) × (1 − base_haircut) + cs_discount(seller) − time_to_resolution_penalty(market)Where:
base_haircutis 5–10%, calibrated against realized vault yield target.cs_discount(seller)rewards high-Chrono-Score sellers with more than market midpoint. Alpha harvesting, not charity — their positions resolve correctly more often than market implies.time_to_resolution_penaltyaccounts for λ-wedge decay.- Execution Score enters as a position-sizing gate, not a price adjustment. A high-CS but low-ExS seller is paid on CS; the vault sizes the position smaller to manage concentration.
Bear case is a business
Section titled “Bear case is a business”If Chrono Score shows zero out-of-sample alpha after 6 months of published data, Fast-Forward degrades gracefully. It becomes a standard market-maker that captures:
- Base bid-ask spread (always positive on illiquid PM contracts)
- The λ-wedge lifetime-decay premium (Yang 2026, literature-quantified)
- Variance risk premium (Lauris 2026, 93% of cost gap)
All three are captured without reputation signal. Still a viable vault. We prefer the alpha case, but we’re not betting the business on it.
Build status
Section titled “Build status”- Spec: complete (
CONCEPTUAL_MODEL.md §4b) - Technical dependencies: Polymarket CTF (open, proven by PolyLend), Kalshi tokenized-position API (when available via DFlow SPL)
- Team: senior Solidity contractor (non-negotiable hire), + existing frontend
- Audit: $30–50K, before TVL > $100K
- Capital: $50–200K vault seed
- Timeline: 10–14 weeks from Solidity dev start
- Legal: non-US entity (Bermuda or Cayman), $15–30K for opinion