Voting is trading. Learn about Upside, a social prediction market on the Base chain.

Upside is a social prediction market built on the Base blockchain, where users predict the popularity of social content by buying and selling "upside tickets" linked to tweets, articles, or videos. Key features include:

Unique Link Market: Each content link can only create one market, incentivizing early discoverers. The first uploader gets exclusive rights, and high-quality markets earn rewards from the platform's "prediction pool."
Dynamic Pricing: Tickets start at $0.01 (USDC), capped at 1 million, with prices rising as demand increases. Users can hold or trade tickets for profits, with all transactions recorded on-chain.
Incentive Structure: Rewards (in USDC) are distributed to:
- Curators (5% of pool for top-voted links)
- Voters (80% based on ticket holdings)
- Traders (profit from price fluctuations)
- Inviters (50% of invitee's protocol fees for 50 days)
- Original creators (15% if their content wins).
Anti-Manipulation: Uses on-chain records, minimum funding thresholds, and 5-minute settlement delays. Currently supports X (Twitter) links, with potential future expansions.
Development Status: Launched in June 2025, in invite-only phase. Raised $1.2M pre-seed funding in 2024 ($10M valuation). Core mechanisms are live, but the platform remains early-stage with ongoing iterations.

Note: The project is experimental, and no investment advice is implied.

Author: Daisy, ChainCatcher

Editor: Fairy, ChainCatcher

Social prediction platform based on Base

Upside is a social prediction market built on the Base blockchain network. The core mechanism is to judge and gamble on the dissemination trend of social content. Users can upload links that they think have the potential to be "explosive", such as tweets, articles or videos, and the platform will then create an independent market around the link. Other users can participate in the prediction by purchasing "upside tickets" to determine whether the content will be widely disseminated.

The act of "listing tickets" requires payment of USDC stablecoins, with an initial price of $0.01. A maximum of 1 million tickets will be issued, and the ticket price will increase dynamically with the purchase volume. Users can hold the tickets and wait for appreciation, or sell them midway to gain profits. All transactions are recorded on the chain to ensure openness, transparency and traceability.

The platform implements the "unique link market" system, and the same content cannot be created repeatedly. The first uploader enjoys exclusive creation rights, which effectively encourages early discovery of content. Each high-quality market will receive rewards from the platform's "prediction pool", which will be distributed proportionally to link uploaders, original content creators, and ticket participants in the form of USDC.

Mechanism Design and Incentive Structure

Compared with traditional prediction markets that focus on objective results, such as Polymarket, the mechanism built by Upside is based on the subjective trend judgment of content popularity, which is more in line with the user's usage logic and judgment method in the social media environment. It does not judge "whether an event has occurred", but judges "which content may become popular".

Upside is based on the "unique link market" mechanism. Each social link can only create a market once, avoiding repeated competition and giving content discoverers clear incentives. This model is different from content ownership-based protocols such as Zora, which emphasizes the uploading and holding of content. Upside does not require users to migrate or host original content, but only uses external links as market carriers, focusing on speculation rather than ownership.

The platform has set up a diversified revenue path. All rewards are issued in USDC, covering five main user roles:

Curators: If the uploaded link gets the most votes in a round, they will receive 5% of the prediction pool reward;
Voters: Those who hold votes in this market share 80% of the rewards, distributed according to the proportion of votes held;
Traders: Earn the price difference by buying low and selling high. Currently, the platform does not charge any handling fees.
Inviters: After inviting a user, you can get 50% of the protocol fees generated by the user within the first 50 days;
Creators: If the original content becomes the winning market, they can receive 15% of the prediction pool reward.

It is worth noting that a single piece of content can become the winning market in multiple prediction rounds, and relevant participants can continue to gain profits.

At the execution level, Upside prevents manipulation through on-chain records, minimum funding thresholds, and five-minute settlement delays. All functions run on the Base network, with low transaction costs and high processing efficiency. The user participation threshold is low, and you only need to paste a link to create or join the market. Currently, the supported content is mainly X (formerly Twitter), and it may be expanded to more platforms in the future.

Team background and development progress

As of now, Upside has not officially disclosed information about its core development team.

The platform was launched on June 10, 2025. It is currently in the invitation code registration stage. The number of users is still limited, mainly concentrated in the crypto community. Some users reported that there may be problems such as registration delays or content verification failures during peak hours.

According to wellfound, Upside completed its pre-seed round of financing in December 2024 with an amount of US$1.2 million and a valuation of US$10 million. The specific investors, share structure and content of the agreement have not been made public, and no official press release has been issued.

From the current functional point of view, the platform has core mechanisms such as market creation, trading, pricing and incentive distribution, and may expand community functions such as rankings and historical records in the future. The overall product is still in the early stage, and the mechanism and functions are in continuous iteration.

This article only introduces early-stage projects and is not intended as investment advice.