TL;DR

• The last playable round is on 12 August 2026. No new rounds run after that.

• Any referral and streak rewards you have earned will be sent to your Trepa wallet on 13 August 2026.

• The app stays online until 30 September 2026 so you can withdraw. After that it will not be reachable.

• If you have a balance, withdraw it before then. Open the app, go to your wallet, send it to an address you control.

• If you miss the deadline, you can recover access via home.privy.io. This only works if you signed up to Trepa with an email address.

We were not able to find product-market fit. The crypto market was difficult, but that does not really change the assessment. Below is what we got wrong, in case any of it is useful to someone building something adjacent.

What we bet on

Trepa paid you for how close you got, not for which side you picked. You named a number, and your share of the pool scaled with your distance from the outcome.

We were betting that people want to predict a number rather than pick a side and get paid for accuracy. Every incumbent asks for a discrete answer: yes or no, up or down, over or under. We were also betting that a third mechanic could take hold at all, alongside traditional trading and binary prediction markets.

We chose pari-mutuel knowing the cost. No fixed odds, so you cannot know your payout when you commit, and no way out of a position once entered. We accepted both because scoring with pro-rata distribution was the only structure we found that rewards numerical accuracy fairly and stays legible to an ordinary user.

Demand for one thing is not demand for another

We implicitly reasoned by analogy. People bet on uncertain outcomes at enormous scale, therefore people will want to bet on precision. That does not follow.

In a binary market your payout depends on being right. In Trepa it depended on being more accurate than everyone else in the pool, and on enough of them being there in the same window. Different product, different psychology.

Cognitive load will explain at least some of it. Choosing a number to decimal precision asks more of a person than choosing yes or no, and it probably removes some of the fun. We saw a version of this earlier, when a time decay weighting we added made payouts harder to understand without moving retention. Our read now is that in consumer betting, simplicity may be the whole product.
The trading mental model is also dominant and we could not re-educate around it. Users arrive expecting to trade an asset the way they do on Polymarket or a perp venue. Asking them to think in accuracy-scores and a contest format rather than in position did not seem to transfer.

Our growth plan diluted the thing we needed

A pari-mutuel pool with proportional scoring needs a crowd predicting in the same window. Thin pools mean small payouts, unstable variance and a worse experience for everyone in them.

We ran one live hour a day, 1 to 2pm UTC, with sixty-second rounds. That concentrated users, but it required them to build their day around us. Every day. Retention degraded under that ask, and degraded more the longer someone had been with us.

The scaling plan was more assets and more time windows. We recognized the contradiction too late: every unit of expansion dilutes the concurrency the mechanism depends on. We treated it as a tension to manage. In the end we could not see a version of scaling Trepa that did not first make Trepa worse.

Reaching people was harder than we assumed

Referrals did not work and paid KOLs returned almost nothing. B2B2C through builder codes and an embeddable widget looked like our best channel on paper, but it ran into a wall: every partner conversation required us to justify the 1 to 2pm UTC window, and the answer was that the window exists because we need concurrency. Explaining your structural weakness as part of the pitch is not a strong position.

We were also wrong about the market. Geographic restrictions removed a large share of the addressable audience before we started. Onramping is a brutal hurdle for any crypto consumer app. And reported crypto DAU and MAU figures, including from sources we trusted, are softer than they look. Our working conclusion is that the genuinely active audience for a product like this is in the hundreds of thousands at the moment, not the millions.

Thank you

To everyone who showed up at 1pm UTC every day, and predicted through however many rounds. Some users did 2,000+ rounds. You were the reason any of this was worth building.

To @anamansari062, @reubence, @kioLmao, @0xapacx who built this. All of them are looking for their next mission, so if you are hiring, get in touch with them or with us.

To @CosmicDude3000, @0xllamii, @uretsky17510, @a_yo_figma whose work is still in what we shipped.

To our investors, who backed an unproven mechanism, UI/UX, and two founders. You took the risk knowingly and you deserved a better outcome.

To the @SolanaFndn, @solanamobile, and to the @superteam eco, with special shout outs to @SuperteamKorea, @SuperteamSG, @SuperteamDE, @SuperteamIN, and @SuperteamBlack. The support we had was not the thing that was missing.

To our infrastructure and security partners (@AdevarLabs, @PhageSec), who kept our product running and audited without drama.

To the friends who gave us feedback we did not want to hear, and kept giving it.

We still think there is something in the argument that people will pay to be measured on how close they get. We were not the team that found the way to build a business around it.

Jong and Leon

TL;DR

Trepa is a different type of prediction market. Instead of choosing between two outcomes, you predict the exact BTC price. Payouts increase with prediction accuracy.

V3 launches on July 28 with a redesigned interface and updated payout logic based on user feedback.

Why the focus on accuracy, again?

Trepa is built on the conviction that humans are fascinated with watching and attempting feats of strength (Eddie Hall), speed (Usain Bolt), intelligence (Magnus Carlsen), but also accuracy.

There exists ample evidence for accuracy as entertainment. For example, The Price Is Right is a US TV series running non-stop since 1972 where contestants try to out-predict others by naming the price of consumer goods as accurately as possible. Then there is GeoGuessr, a geography game in which players try to pinpoint exact locations from Google Street View imagery. We have also all seen Yusuf Dikeç effortlessly lift his air pistol and hit a bullseye during the last Olympics. Lastly, open TikTok and you’re guaranteed to come across viral trick shot videos that have taken the creator thousands of attempts for millions of views.

We also strongly believe that current (binary) prediction markets operate with painful informational losses for continuous outcomes, i.e. outcomes that are numbers like asset prices (BTC, ETH, SOL, equities, commodities, FX, compute), but also things like GDP, trade balances, non-farm payrolls, and public debt. The phenomenon is called discretization, wherein the continuous outcome is sliced into halves or into buckets (ranges). A good example is the 5-minute BTC up/down market on Polymarket where traders predict whether BTC’s price will beat its previous close price from 5 minutes ago. This market is popular due to its conceptual simplicity. At the same time, however, its structural design involving binary outcome tokens also forces convictions into a yes-or-no answer which limits expressivity and a more granular information collection.

Okay, so how does Trepa work?

Every round takes 1 minute: 30 seconds to place your prediction, then 30 seconds to watch and see how close the price lands. You set a target (green line) for where you think the price will be when the round ends, then watch the live price (orange line) to see how close you got. Unlike yes/no markets like Polymarket or Kalshi, there’s no side to pick, just your best prediction of the number.

Once predictions lock, the watch phase begins. Trepa shows you a live payout curve and a payout amount that updates in real time as the price moves. The closer the price gets to your target, the bigger your payout.

Small improvements near your target matter more. More specifically, your payout is a function of a convex accuracy score relative to others. What this means is that if the outcome moves a bit closer to your target, it has a disproportionate positive effect on your accuracy score. Your share of the prize pool is then derived from your accuracy score pro-rata. You can never lose more than half your stake.

Trepa’s V3 is an entirely new take on prediction UI/UX that cannot be copied by a trading-focused app like Polymarket/Kalshi without abandoning their orderbook.

Where do I play?

On trepa.app, every day from 1-2pm UTC, starting July 28th, 2026.

We run one communal hour because everyone has to be playing at the same moment for the prize pool to be worth entering, and we would rather run full pools for one hour than empty ones all day. Eventually, the plan is to scale rounds to tens of thousands of concurrent players, and make Trepa the largest real-time asset price accuracy contest in the world.

Where Trepa is headed next

Of course, we want to eventually expand to other crypto assets beyond BTC like SOL, HYPE, as well as equities (think NVDA, SKHY), commodities (OIL, GOLD), FX (EUR/USD), and even compute.

Moreover, we’re currently working hard on our partner program (similar to “Builder Codes”) where third-party frontends integrate the Trepa app. We’re essentially working on bringing Trepa into your favorite CEX, DEX, wallet, and trading aggregators.

Call to action

1. Turn on notifications for https://x.com/trepa_io to see our launch video on July 28th.

2. Sign up for Trepa at trepa.app and pre-deposit USDC on Solana.

3. Then on the 28th of July, 1-2pm UTC, test your precision intuition on Trepa, either on mobile or desktop, and share your wins with us by tagging @trepa_io on X (Twitter).

The Trepa team 🫶🏼.

We did not start with a mechanism. We started with one goal: reward precision, and nothing else. Then we went looking for a market structure that does that, and eliminated every option until one was left. The survivor was pari-mutuel over a continuous outcome, run at high frequency. Almost every expert will tell you pari-mutuel is the wrong foundation for a prediction market. They are right, almost always. I’ll lay out below the narrow case where they are wrong, and why we bet Trepa on it.

TL;DR: The structure we landed on has three famous weaknesses: you cannot see your payout when you commit, you cannot exit, and once you are in you can only watch it resolve. Our bet is that under two constraints, 1) continuous outcomes and 2) a sub-minute clock, those weaknesses become the product. The helpless watching turns into the most watchable moment in any market app, and existing trading-based platforms cannot copy it without tearing up their core structure.

What we were actually looking for

We wanted to reward numerical precision, the pure distance between what you predicted and what turned out to be true. Numerical, because so many events in the real world are actually not about Yes or No. We have never been about which side you picked but about how close you were.

1. Binary prediction markets reward the side. You buy yes or no, up or down, the event happens or it does not, but the center of gravity of your conviction earns nothing. Polymarket and Kalshi run this as an order book, a genuinely good machine for what it does. It just cannot measure closeness, because there is no closeness in a yes or no.

2. Leveraged directional products and spread betting reward side and magnitude together. You are paid more for being more right, but on an open-ended payoff, so the score is how hard you leaned rather than how close you landed.

3. Traditional pari-mutuel rewards the correct discrete pick and nothing finer. Horse no. 6 wins or it does not. There is no “almost,” because the outcome space is a short list of names rather than a number line.

Three obvious candidates, all out for the same reason: they are built on discrete sides (picks) or open-ended magnitude, and neither can express “you were off by…”. We needed a reward that is a smooth function of distance to the truth, which takes two things at once. A continuous outcome to measure distance against, and a mechanism that pays by relative closeness rather than a fixed quote on a predefined claim. Only one mechanism does the second part. Pari-mutuel splits a shared pool among those who were right, in proportion to “something”. Typically, this is their stakes but put a continuous outcome under the pari-mutuel and what matters becomes how close they were. That is the unlock.

We even ruled out the slow version of our own answer. Continuous pari-mutuel over long horizons, predict where Bitcoin closes this quarter and wait three months, rewards precision in theory and is miserable in practice, for reasons we will get to. The survivor was continuous pari-mutuel at high frequency.

The case against the thing we landed on

Having chosen pari-mutuel on the merits, I have to be honest about its reputation.

In a pari-mutuel pool, everyone’s money goes into one pot, and when the outcome is known the pot is split among the people who were right, in proportion to what they put in. There is no fixed payout, you do not know your return when you commit, and you cannot trade out once you are in. An order book is the opposite on all three. You get a price the moment you buy, you have established mental models to weigh risk against reward, and you can sell at any point before the event resolves.

Against that, pari-mutuel looks primitive. You are flying blind on price. You cannot get out. You can only wait and watch. Every serious objection comes down to one of these three: no fixed payout at entry, no exit, no control.

The (semi-)anonymous actuary who writes the analytics blog Plus EV Analytics and whose models have guided over $100 million in betting positions, laid out the honest case for and against pari-mutuel. He calls one objection the elephant in the room. People would rather commit at a number they can see than at a return that is still forming, and they bristle when the multiplier on screen at the moment they commit is not the one their position finally pays. He concludes that if pari-mutuel struggles to reach a mainstream audience, this is overwhelmingly the reason.

So the textbook says never build a modern prediction market on pari-mutuel, and the textbook is correct, given what it imagines: discrete outcomes that resolve far in the future. An election. A rate decision. A yes or no that settles weeks from now. Under those conditions every weakness above bites hard, and an order book is probably better. We are not building that though. There are two things that make us different and those two things turn each weakness into an asset.

The first constraint: continuous outcomes

The first constraint we arrived at by working backward from precision. Stop asking which discrete thing will happen and start asking where a number will land.

Trepa rounds ask you to predict where a metric, currently BTC against USD, will land at a specific moment, with (multiple) decimal places of precision. You place your conviction on a single point on the line.

In a market built on outcome tokens, expressivity is capped. With two outcomes you can buy one side or the other, and the number of distinct things you can say is a function of how many outcomes the market offers. That number is small because someone defines each outcome in advance. The market intern sets the questions. You only answer them.

Continuous outcomes remove the cap. There is no list to pick from. The outcome space is the number line, your prediction is any point on it, and the distance between your point and the truth is what gets measured and rewarded. That is your precision, and it is the only thing being scored.

A pari-mutuel pool over a continuous outcome is the only structure where your reward is a function of how close you were and nothing else, measured against where everyone else landed. No side to take, no leverage to apply. The main point is: closeness is the entire game, and no other mechanism makes closeness the entire game.

This is why an order book was never an option for us, however good it is at its own job. To use one we would have to predefine the outcomes, and the moment we did that we would be back to discrete picks with the precision gone. If you want to reward closeness exclusively, you cannot use a book [1].

The second constraint: high frequency

Continuous outcomes make scoring precision possible and fix expressivity. But they do nothing for the three classic complaints of pari-mutuel. For that you need the second constraint, and it is easily missed: make the rounds short, under a minute. This is where the contrarian bet lives, because short rounds are what actually converts each weakness into the experience.

A payout that updates live, lurching up and down as the price moves, is the best thing about the product rather than a defect to apologize for, as long as it feels like watching a show. Your read on where the price is heading stays fully yours, and you can sharpen it with order flow, microstructure, AI-assistance, any edge you can find. What you give up is narrow: locking your exact multiplier before you commit, the way an order book quotes you a fixed price up front. The forecasting edge is untouched. The moving multiplier (payout) you get instead is the entertainment, not the cost.

Then the other two, no exit and no control, which are really one thing. Once predictions lock, you cannot get out and you cannot adjust. You have no move to make. Across weeks that would be genuine helplessness, the worst kind of waiting. But if you compress it into a sub-minute window with the price moving live, the helplessness inverts into what makes a horse race thrilling to watch. You have already placed everything. Now you can only lean forward and root for the number and this makes the feeling so big.

The weakness was the feature

This is the whole argument in one screen. Your prediction sits locked as a bright line, marked “My Prediction” at 73,115.05. The live Bitcoin price moves across the chart second by second. Riding alongside it is a single number in a green bubble, $10.61, what your position would pay right now if the current Bitcoin price was the final outcome.

Once predictions lock, nothing about anyone’s position can change. Everyone is in. Nobody can hedge, add, or pull out. Every variable is frozen except one. The live price.

In an order book this would be a dead, helpless period. In Trepa it is the show. Because the payout is not fixed and the pool is shared, that number in the green bubble is alive. As the price drifts toward your prediction it climbs and you feel the dopamine. As it pulls toward where the crowd clustered, it compresses and your stomach drops. The same live price does this to everyone at once, in different directions, depending on where each person planted their conviction. You are on the edge of your seat rooting for a number.

That is only possible because of the exact properties the textbook warned against. A fixed payout would set your return the moment you entered and the watch would be inert. The ability to trade out would dissolve the tension, which exists only while you are committed and unable to act. Every supposed weakness is load-bearing for the one experience nobody else can offer. A round runs under a minute because that is the rhythm of attention a generation raised on short video already lives by. The clock is set by the show, and the show is the whole point.

Why this wins, and how it could lose

Neither constraint works alone. Continuous outcomes over long horizons leave you holding an uncertain position for weeks, which is genuinely bad. High frequency over discrete outcomes is just a fast coin flip. The intersection does the work. Pari-mutuel needs the continuous outcome to reward precision, and it needs the short window to turn its own weaknesses into an entertainment.

I will be just as clear about how this fails. If Trepa loses, it will be because a precise prediction takes real cognitive effort, and the promise of a quick multiplier plus a thrilling watch phase was not enough to make people pay that effort, round after round. That is the bet in one sentence. We think the show is worth the thinking. Also, we believe that a diverse audience will enjoy placing predictions on our app: from vibe-predictors, microstructure-sharps, AI-ensemble masters, to chart-reading sorcerers.

To summarize, we went looking for a structure that rewards precision exclusively, eliminated everything else, and found the lone survivor came with famous flaws. The thesis is that high frequency and a careful interface convert those flaws into the most watchable moment in markets. As far as we can tell, we are the only ones standing in this corner.

If you think there is a fourth weakness we have not priced in, I would like to hear it. We love pushback that makes our product stronger.

A closing note on why precision, of all things. The fixation predates the company. The founding team is German, and exactness is a virtue the culture cares about, in engineering, in how you speak, in ordinary daily life. Building a product that pays out for being precise, and nothing else, felt like the obvious thing to make, rather than a market-design exercise.

Footnotes

1. There is a known hybrid called a dynamic pari-mutuel market (DPM), introduced by David Pennock in 2004, which crosses a pari-mutuel pool with a continuous double auction so participants can sell before resolution. It is worth addressing because the name sounds like what we built, yet it solves a different problem. DPM is defined over discrete, mutually exclusive outcomes, the “pays out if outcome i occurs” form, and “dynamic” refers to continuous trading over time rather than a continuous outcome space. Because you can sell as the pool grows, current DPM implementations that we are aware of reward entering an outcome early and riding later inflows, which can pay off regardless of whether that outcome is correct. That incentivizes aping into a side for momentum rather than being accurate.

Hi,

Eighteen months ago, Leon and I met arguing about Polymarket on Reddit. We were both fascinated by prediction markets and frustrated by the same thing: the binary structure throws away most of what people actually know. Someone who thinks BTC will be at $82,000 and someone who thinks it will be at $95,000 look identical in a market with a $80,000 threshold. Both are just “YES.”

We wanted to know if there was a way to let people express the number, not just the side of the threshold. To reward being closer over being right. To turn the wait between guess and outcome from dead time into the most interesting part of the round.

After 18 months of building, 2 pivots, four hackathon wins, two audits, and a 122,000-person waitlist, Trepa goes live tomorrow.

This post is to tell you exactly what to expect and how to make the most of the next two weeks.

When and how to play

Tomorrow, May 20, at 11:00 UTC, Trepa opens for early access.

For the next two weeks, Trepa runs as a live event: 60 rounds per day, all packed into a single hour from 11:00 UTC to 12:00 UTC. Hard start, hard stop. When you open the app outside that window, you’ll see a countdown to the next session.

We’re concentrating early access into one hour for a specific reason. The watch phase, where you see your potential payout climb or collapse in real time as the price moves, only works when rounds are full. Spreading the first cohort across 24 hours would produce empty rooms. One hour means packed rounds, the watch phase as it’s meant to be experienced, and a real shared moment every day.

Set a reminder by signing up to Trepa Early Access Launch on Luma. You will get a calendar invite.

Invite codes

Invite codes start going out within the next few hours, sent to the email address you used to sign up for the waitlist. There are 2 ways to get one:

1. Waitlist referral ranking. The top of the waitlist by referral count receives codes first. If you’ve been sharing Trepa with friends, your rank is the result of that work. Waitlist: trepa.app/waitlist

2. Community drops. We’re seeding codes throughout the Trepa Discord and on X.

If you don’t have a code yet, you can still climb. Referral counts continue to update right up to and through the launch window. Every signup you bring in pushes you higher on the waitlist.

The Launch Forecaster Cup: $5,000 USDC across five categories

To make the next two weeks count, we’re running a contest from launch through the end of the early access period.

The contest runs from the first round on May 20 through the final round on Day 14 (June 1) at 12:00 UTC. The total prize pool is $5,000 USDC, paid directly to winners’ Trepa wallets within 30 days of the contest closing.

Category 1: Sharpest Forecaster - $2,000 USDC

The user with the highest all-time CAR (geometric mean of Precision Scores) at the end of the 2-week period wins. Minimum 50 qualifying rounds. This is the headline skill prize, awarded to whoever proves most consistently accurate over the full window. Ties are broken by the user’s total round-participation count during early access.

Category 2: Longest Streak - $1,000 USDC

The user with the longest single uninterrupted streak of accumulator-qualifying rounds wins. A qualifying round is any round with Precision Score ≥ 777. A streak ends when (a) the user plays a round and scores below 777, or (b) the user does not play any round for a 24-hour calendar period. Each user’s longest single streak across the 14 days is their score. Ties are broken by the user’s overall CAR across all rounds during early access.

Category 3: Crowd Beater - $750 USDC

The user with the highest crowd-beat rate wins. A user beats the crowd on a round if their absolute error is strictly less than the crowd consensus’s absolute error (ties do not count as beats). Minimum 30 paid rounds during early access to qualify. Winner is the user with the highest crowd-beat rate (crowd beats divided by paid rounds played). Ties on rate are broken by the absolute number of crowd beats.

Category 4: Single Round Hero - $500 USDC

The user whose single prediction came closest to the actual outcome across any individual round during the 2 weeks wins, measured by absolute error. Minimum 5 paid rounds played during early access to qualify. Tiebreaker is the user’s next-best single-round absolute error, then third-best, and so on. If users remain tied after all qualifying rounds are exhausted, the tiebreaker is the earlier waitlist signup timestamp.

Category 5: The Creator - $750 USDC across 5 winners ($150 each)

The five best user-generated clips, threads, or posts about Trepa rounds, judged by the Trepa team based on creativity and storytelling. To submit, post on X (tagging @trepa_io) and share in our Discord #community-content channel. Content must be original and meaningfully feature your own Trepa gameplay, round outcomes, or experience. AI-generated content is permitted only if substantially edited and curated by the user. Each user can win at most one The Creator prize. Plagiarism, copied content, or engagement manipulation disqualifies all entries from that user. Submission deadline: June 2, 2026 (Day 14 of early access) at 23:59 UTC.

Eligibility and rules (applies to all categories)

A user may win in multiple categories; the contest does not restrict winners to one prize each. Trepa core team members are not eligible. Winners announced within 7 days of the early access period ending. Prizes paid directly to winners’ Trepa wallets in USDC. Winners are responsible for any tax obligations arising from their prize.

Trepa reserves the right to disqualify any user from any category for evidence of cheating, exploitation of bugs, or behavior that violates the spirit of the contest. Trepa reserves the right to modify these rules during the contest period in response to unforeseen circumstances; material rule changes will be announced to all participants. Judging decisions by the Trepa team are final and not subject to appeal.

XP boost during early access

Every prediction you make during early access earns 2x XP. This boost is only available during the 2-week early access period. The XP you earn now will shape your starting position when general access opens and may affect your eligibility for future programs.

What to do today and tomorrow

1. Check your email for the invite code. Codes are going out today. If yours doesn’t arrive by tomorrow morning, check your spam folder and message us on Discord.

2. RSVP on Luma so you don’t forget: Trepa Early Access Launch on Luma. Signing up adds a calendar invite to your inbox. The session is one hour. If you miss it, you’ll wait 23 hours for the next one. Note: signing up for the Luma event does not guarantee an invite code.

3. Join the Telegram announcement channel for real-time notifications when pools go live and for major product announcements: https://t.me/trepa_announcements

4. Join the Discord community to find other forecasters, share clips, and compete for the Launch Forecaster Cup: https://discord.gg/trepa

One more thing

We’ve spent 18 months thinking about how to reward precision instead of direction, how to make the wait between guess and outcome the most engaging part of the round, and how to build a prediction protocol that gives people credit for the actual numbers they have in their heads.

Tomorrow at 11:00 UTC, we find out if we got it right.

If you’re with us for the next two weeks, thank you. The 122,000 of you on this list are the reason this product exists in the form it does.

See you at 11:00 UTC.

Jong & Leon & Trepa team

Hey,

Early access launches Wednesday, May 20th, 2026.

The top 5,000 on the waitlist get an invite code on launch day. Everyone else gets invites in the days and weeks after, dropped through Discord, our socials, and a few campaigns we’ll run after launch.

How to get in

Waitlist rank decides who gets in first. You can check your rank at trepa.app/waitlist once you submit your email address, and rank moves with referrals.

If you’re already inside the top 5,000, the work between today and May 20 is keeping your spot, since other people are referring too. If you’re outside it, the next two weeks are the cheapest window to climb. Rank gets harder to move once the ranking fills with launch-day signups.

The math is direct: getting from rank 8,000 to rank 4,000 today is a function of telling four or five people who’d actually use Trepa.

Four things to do right now

1. Join the Telegram for launch updates: https://t.me/trepa_announcements

2. Join the Discord community: https://discord.gg/trepa. This is also where invite codes will drop after launch.

3. If you love Trepa: install Trepa as a PWA on your phone. Walkthrough is here.

4. Pre-fund your Trepa wallet with USDC on Solana so you can play immediately on May 20. Walkthrough is here.

The PWA install and the pre-fund are the two that will save you actual minutes on launch day. The other two are how you stay in the loop.

What “ready for mainnet” actually means

Two independent security reviews on the way here. The first was with Adevar Labs in November. The second just wrapped with Phage Security. Both reports are public.

Phage found 15 issues across two high-severity, six medium, and seven low. All 15 are fixed and verified. Their closing line in the report is “the codebase is in good shape for mainnet.” We agree.

Read Phage’s report · Read Adevar’s report

The other half of “ready” is the testing the audits don’t capture. We’ve been running Trepa through layered test environments for months. Devnet first, then mainnet under controlled conditions, then a closed alpha with a small group of real users putting real predictions through real rounds. Each layer surfaced things the previous one couldn’t. The alpha in particular caught the kind of edge cases that only show up when actual humans interact with the system at speed: behavior under network jitter, timing around the 30-second windows, the specific moments where the UI confuses a first-time player. Those are fixed now too.

What lands alongside launch

A quests program will go live soon, run with the help of domino.run. Early access players get a lasting boost to what they earn from it. The boost only applies to people who got in through the top 5,000 path.

We’ll send the details closer to launch. The short version: getting in early compounds.

Small print: regional restrictions apply. See the terms of service.

Wednesday, May 20. Top 5,000.

See you in a round.

Best,

Trepa team

The most expensive thing a startup can do is get the audience wrong. We did, and V1 of Trepa is the receipt.

V1 was a forecasting platform with academic ambitions. Long horizons, macro metrics, the kind of framing that would be at home in a research brief. We thought we were building for the kind of person who reads Tetlock and runs simulations on their lunch break. Those people exist. They just were not going to use us.

Academic forecasters and finance professionals already have battle-tested tools. Established markets, real liquidity, decades of risk math, EV-driven habits formed in venues where the spreads are tight. If you are hunting for edge, you go where the order books are deep. You do not go to a crypto-native startup with a clever scoring formula and a small audience.

We brought the wrong audience to the wrong product at the wrong time. Three wrongs do not make a right.

The diagnosis

Two things broke the loop. Resolution windows were too long, so rounds returned no dopamine. We had also spent a lot of time finding a model that matched the trader mental model of expected return and risk-reward, and we now know that the audience that wanted that math was not the audience a parimutuel game was ever going to serve. The macro framing made every prediction feel high-stakes in a bad way, when what people actually wanted was a low-cost way to test their intuition and play again. The product had been built for a forecaster who wanted to feel smart. The audience that showed up wanted to feel something.

What V2 is

Flash Pools is the rebuild. The bottom line: $1 entry, 1 minute, 100x.

Players forecast BTC price. Thirty seconds to commit, thirty seconds to resolve. The closer half wins, the closest winners earn the most, and the next round starts immediately. Eventually there’ll be 24x60=1440 rounds every day. Everything that made V1 feel like a graduate seminar got cut. Everything that tightens the feedback loop got prioritized.

The core loop is engineered to be addictive in the right way. One minute is the right length: short enough that you always think “one more round,” long enough that the prediction feels like a real decision. The split into a forecast window and a resolution window creates natural tension and release. That structure is the same emotional architecture that makes the most engaging consumer products work.

Who it’s for

A short timeframe plus a gamified frame changes what the system is even for. Someone who shows up for a one-minute game is not bringing trader-grade expectations about expected value or Sharpe-ratio optimization. They should not be. The whole point of Flash Pools is that you can play without doing that math, and the math you would do at a real trading venue would tell you to play somewhere else anyway.

This is what V1 got wrong. We treated the absence of EV-driven framing as a gap to fill while it is actually the feature.

What we chose not to build

V2 is opinionated about its omissions.

Long time horizons. Anything longer than a minute reintroduces the problem we just solved. If you want to forecast next quarter’s inflation print, there are better products for that.

Conditional and parlay markets. Stacking probabilities into compound predictions is interesting, and it is also the fastest way to make a player open a calculator. We wanted players in the round, not in a spreadsheet.

A complex onboarding tutorial. The product has to teach itself in the first round, or it has lost. Anything that forces a player through more than a few seconds of explanation before their first prediction is a tax we refused to pay.

Heavy social mechanics at launch. Friend graphs, public profiles, follow features, in-app chat. All of it can come later. None of it is what makes the core loop work.

Skill is still in there

The reasonable critique is that a one-minute prediction game is just gambling with extra steps. We do not fully buy that.

Continuous scoring is the real differentiator. Binary prediction markets flatten the skill curve, because a miss by $1 and a miss by $1,000 produce the same outcome. Rewarding closeness means a calibrated forecaster can consistently outperform a coin flipper. That is what turns a gamble into a game.

We also opened API access so developers and quant-leaning players can programmatically participate. If you want to run a model, run one. If you want to test whether a small calibrated edge survives in a noisy short-horizon environment, do it.

There is a tension here worth naming. We just spent a section saying that Flash Pools is for players who do not want to do EV math, and now we are inviting the people who do nothing else. Both are true at the same time, and the design depends on it. The casual player does not need to think about expected value to enjoy a round. The quant who wants to is welcome. The first group is what makes the game alive. The second is what makes it deep. Neither needs the other to validate them, but the game is better with both in it.

The bottom line

$1 entry, 1 minute, 100x. Real BTC settlement. Continuous scoring that rewards closeness. That is the product we should have built first.

Docs at docs.trepa.io. Developer API at docs.trepa.io/developers. Early access launches in early May.

Best,

Trepa team

Quick one. The Trepa documentation is now live at docs.trepa.io.

If you have been on the waitlist wondering what you actually signed up for, that link is the answer. The whole system is in there. How a one-minute round works. Where the BTC settlement price comes from. Why winners are picked by closeness instead of direction. How the streak accumulator pays out.

We wrote it for the kind of reader who wants to understand a thing before they touch it. That has always been the kind of person we wanted to build Trepa for.

One thing worth saying out loud. Most prediction products ask whether a price goes up or down. Trepa asks how close you can get. That single change rewires the whole game, and the docs are the first place we have laid out why, end to end. If that idea has ever caught you, the docs are where it gets concrete.

If you build

The API and integration docs are at docs.trepa.io/developers. Round/pool data, predictions, user info, and leaderboards are queryable, with a sign-and-submit transaction flow for predictions, stake updates, claims, and withdrawals If you want to build on top of Trepa, that is the door.

If you write

We are running a writing contest on Superteam Earn. 1,500 USDC across five winners. The brief is to explain Trepa and where it sits in the prediction markets landscape. The judging is fully transparent: a public engagement formula on X (20x retweets, 13.5x replies, 10x bookmarks, 1x likes). No vibes, no favorites. The founders’ pick also gets pinned in the docs with full credit.

If you have ever wanted to write something that gets read instead of just published, this is the one.

See the bounty on Superteam Earn

If you are waiting

Early access launches May [REDACTED] 🤫. The waitlist is ranked, and rank decides who gets in first. You can climb by referring friends from trepa.app/waitlist. The leaderboard is live and the top of it is already moving fast with 90k+ signups.

If you have been sitting on your invite link, send it now. The window between today and launch is the cheapest time to move up.

See you in a round.

Jong & Leon

Forget the ceiling. Forget the theological grandeur.

Zoom in.

Closer. All the way to the fingertips.

The most famous image in Western art is not about contact. It is about almost. Two index fingers, a few centimeters apart, one reaching, one relaxed. God and man, separated by a gap so small you could close it with a breath. Michelangelo did not paint the moment of creation but the moment just before. The space between.

That space is where everything interesting lives.

Closeness is the show

There is an event held every year in Europe, and now globally, where professional tram drivers compete to stop a 40-tonne vehicle on a centimeter mark. It is called the World TramDriver Championship. In September 2025, Vienna hosted the first true world edition, with 25 teams from six continents. The marquee discipline is called “Perfect Stop.” The driver must align the center of the tram’s second door with a marking on the ground. A camera captures the moment the doors open, revealing exactly how close they got. The target is mounted on wheels and moved between runs so nobody can memorize landmarks. Every millimeter of deviation costs points.

Think about that for a second. Tens of thousands of people standing in the sun and watching the livestream, holding their breath, watching a tram brake. Not because something explodes. Not because someone wins or loses in a binary sense. Because the question “how close?” turns out to be one of the most fascinating questions humans can ask.

This pattern is everywhere once you start looking. In 2024, a 20-second clip from the German TV show Schlag den Henssler went viral with over 79 million views on X. The clip showed a contestant splitting a soft pretzel into two halves on a precision scale, trying to get them as close to equal weight as possible. No special effects. No storyline. Just a pretzel, a knife, a scale, and the unbearable suspense of watching numbers appear. People lost their minds. Barstool Sports called it “Pure Electricity.” Millions of people who had never heard of German Saturday night television were suddenly, inexplicably captivated by the drama of a scale readout.

On The Price is Right, the longest-running game show in American television history, the entire format is built around closeness. Contestants do not need to know the exact price. They need to get closer than the other person without going over. The Showcase Showdown is the purest version of this: two contestants, whoever is closer wins. In 2024, a contestant bid $39,500 on a package worth $39,501, off by exactly one dollar. Drew Carey called it the best Showcase bid in the history of the show. The audience did not cheer because someone won but because someone got impossibly close.

Then there is GeoGuessr, a game where you are dropped into a random Google Street View location and must guess where on earth you are. Your score is not pass/fail. It is a continuous measure of distance: the closer your pin to the actual location, the more points you earn, up to 5,000 per round. The game has 40 million player accounts, a World Championship that drew 363,000 peak viewers in Copenhagen in 2025, and an entire ecosystem of creators like Rainbolt who built audiences of millions by identifying exact locations from a single blurred frame. GeoGuessr is, at its core, a closeness engine. The question is never “are you right?” It is always “how close are you?”

The water is rising

Something has shifted. People no longer want to just know whether something will happen. They want to know how close they can get to calling it.

You can see it in how we watch sports. Expected Goals (or xG) replaced the gut-feel punditry of soccer analysis with a continuous measure of shot quality. ESPN added win probability to its permanent scorebug because viewers now expect to see how close a game is, not just who is ahead. You can see it in how we check the weather: a modern 5-day forecast is as accurate as a 1-day forecast was in 1980, and apps like Dark Sky trained a generation to read “37% chance of rain at 3pm” rather than just “rain likely.”

But here is what almost everyone in this space has missed: most prediction products, in particular prediction markets, still collapse the world into binary outcomes. Will it happen or won’t it? Yes or no. Binary is simple to build and simple to understand, which is why it came first. But binary edges are shrinking fast with profitability becoming a stronger function of latency advantages. The game gets boring. More importantly, binary outcomes throw away the most interesting information: how close you actually were.

The next frontier is continuous. Not “will BTC cross $100K?” but “where will it land?” Not “will the Fed cut rates?” but “by how much?” Not “who wins?” but “what will the margin be?” These are harder questions. They demand more from the forecaster but help separate real conviction from coin flips. And they are far more entertaining.

The appetite for this is enormous. The product landscape is almost empty. The world is full of platforms that reward you for being right. Almost nothing exists that rewards you for being close.

The word

Trepa comes from Swedish “traffa,” which means both “to hit a target” and “to meet a person.” The word is borrowed from German “treffen,” which carries the same double meaning. If you meet a friend at the mall, your paths crossed at a single point. If a snowball hits you, your path and the snowball’s path also crossed at a single point. Treffen is convergence. It is what happens when two trajectories meet precisely where they are supposed to.

We grew up watching German game shows on Saturday nights, arguing about whether a pretzel was really split perfectly, feeling the specific German satisfaction of a thing done exactly right. There is a compound word for that: Volltreffer. The full hit. Trepa is that word turned into a product.

What we believe

We believe the world has outgrown binary outcomes. “Will it happen?” is a less interesting question than “how close can you get?” We believe closeness to truth should be measured, celebrated, and rewarded. We believe forecasting is not a niche financial instrument but a skill, a game, and a culture waiting to be built. We believe the best forecasters are not the ones who are always right. They are the ones who are least wrong.

Michelangelo understood something that took the rest of us five centuries to articulate. The most powerful moment is not the moment of contact but the moment just before. The last centimeter before the tram stops. The fraction of a gram on the scale. The distance between your pin and the truth.

We live in that space. Come find us there.

Trepa team

Quick team message

We have been heads down for a while now, and we want to share what is coming.

We have been rebuilding Trepa from the ground up. V2 is an entirely new user experience designed around two things: speed and rewarding precision. If you are weary of long resolution periods, weeks of waiting just to find out if your yes/no bet was right, this is built for you. If you find binary outcomes boring, same. We do too. That is why we started this.

V2 launches in one week through an early access program. In the days leading up to it, we will be publishing our full documentation so you can read through everything before you get your hands on it.

In the meantime, our Discord remains the best place to connect with fellow precision forecasters and to reach the team directly. And if you have not already, give us a follow on X.

You’ve heard us talk about precision predictions for months. Today, it is finally real. Trepa is now live on Solana mainnet. For the first time, you can stake your forecasting skills and get paid based on how accurate you are compared to the crowd.

This is your launch-day rundown.

The important bits

• What is Trepa in one sentence?
  Trepa is the only prediction platform that ties payouts directly to numerical accuracy: the closer you get, the bigger you win.

• Why is this a big deal?
  Binary bets can only reward direction. They are about picking the right side. Trepa rewards absolute precision. If the real world runs on numbers, prediction platforms should too.

• What can I predict?
  Real numbers across multiple categories: prices, earnings, macro data, sports stats, election margins, and more.

• How do payouts work?
  You get paid based on your error compared to everyone else’s. Your error is simply the distance between your estimate and the final outcome number. Higher precision equals higher returns.

• How do I start?
  Visit www.trepa.app and connect a Solana wallet. We can also create a new one for you automatically, if you sign up with your email address.

• Referral rewards?
  Yes. Every invited friend, who makes a prediction, counts. Details will soon follow.

What makes Trepa different

The world has never had a platform where accuracy is the currency. Traditional prediction markets care only about yes or no. Trepa cares about how close YOU get. It turns forecasting into a competitive sport, where every digit and decimal place matters and where skill is rewarded instead of luck.

This is powered by our accuracy-weighted pari-mutuel pools. Technically, Trepa is not a prediction market where you trade event contracts. It is a new system that determines payouts based on precision. You can think of it like The Price Is Right or GeoGuessr, only more fun and competitive.

Call to action (optional but appreciated)

If you want to support launch visibility, a QT or RT of the launch video on X helps a lot with distribution.

re keeping an eye on the QTs and comments from the community. It means a lot to the team. No pressure though.

What you can do today

1. Sign up to the Trepa app.1

2. Make your first precision prediction.

3. Share your prediction card on X with your referral link.

4. Give us feedback on Discord.

5. Check out our Docs.

Thank you

The launch of Trepa is possible because people supported us before anyone else could see the vision. Thank you to all our investors, partners and friends. Above all, a big thank you to our community members, especially beta users. Your belief got us here.

Trepa is live. Today is day one. The leaderboard starts now.

→ Follow us on X

→ Join our Discord

→ Check out www.trepa.app

This is a post by cofounder Jong (https://x.com/guyukyukgu).

The original accuracy game: Galton and the fat ox

It is the year 1906, and Plymouth is hosting the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. Sir Francis Galton, half-cousin to Charles Darwin, wanders through the fair and stumbles upon a weight-judging competition with roughly 800 participants. The rules are simple: whoever guesses the weight of a fat (I’m just citing Galton lol), dressed ox would win prizes. A “dressed ox” means the animal has been slaughtered, cleaned, and prepared for butchering.

After the event, Galton borrows the tickets containing all estimates to crunch some statistics. After removing 13 faulty entries, he keeps 878 valid submissions. Surprisingly, the median estimate (which he called the vox populi) is 1,207 pounds while the actual weight is 1,198 pounds: an error of only 0.8%.

However, a later 1907 enquiry will reveal that the actual average estimate was 1,197 pounds, lowering the error to less than 0.1%. And much later, archival work in 2014 will show that the true weight wasn’t 1,198 but 1,197 pounds. Meaning: the average guess perfectly predicted the ox’s weight.

This anecdote became the classic demonstration of the “wisdom of crowds,” first conceptualized in Nature under the term democratic judgement.

What this has to do with Trepa

I’m telling you all this because the parallels to Trepa are surprisingly direct. At its core, Trepa shares the same competitive spirit and incentives as the ox weight-judging contest, only applied to any numerical outcome instead of an ox’s weight.

Is the weight of an ox inherently interesting? Probably not. But once you frame it as a prediction competition with monetary incentives, suddenly hundreds of people engaged. The organizers tapped into one of the strongest drivers of human behavior: speculation as motivation. As Galton put it, the “sixpenny fee deterred practical joking, and the hope of a prize and the joy of competition prompted each competitor to do his best.”

Trepa is no different really. The whole concept is fairly straightforward but the fact that nearly 800 people voluntarily participated in 1906 shows how powerful a simple competition framework can be.

(Btw, Sir Francis Galton would have made an excellent Trepa mascot if it weren’t for, you know… the eugenics stuff 🤷.)

Humans honor precision

Even more than a century later, people remain obsessed with figuring out how close they were. The appeal of measurable accuracy shows up everywhere, from GeoGuessr, a simple location-guessing game that somehow evolved into a viral multi-million-user platform, to the bizarrely captivating German pretzel-cutting contest, where participants try to slice a pretzel into two perfectly weighted halves, to long-running shows like The Price Is Right, which has sustained decades of popularity by asking contestants to estimate retail prices as precisely as possible. Precision is both fun and status-bearing.

In sports betting, a Huddle analysis shows that numerical player props (yards, touchdowns, etc.) are now the fastest-growing portion of NFL betting. On Polymarket and Kalshi, many of the highest-volume markets are also numerical: prices, yields, GDP prints, NFP numbers, election margins, weather data.

More recently, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, praised participants in an internal earnings prediction challenge, noting that ten users landed within 1% of actual results and one was off by only 0.06%. Precision demonstrates competence.

All of this suggests a large and enduring latent demand for speculative competitions based on numerical accuracy.

What Trepa is, fundamentally

There are many ways I could define Trepa. I could do it positively, by listing what Trepa is, or negatively, by listing what it is not. But the quickest path to the core is the comparative method: looking at Trepa alongside a familiar reference point such as a binary prediction market (e.g. Polymarket).

Both prediction markets and Trepa ultimately care about accuracy, but they measure it differently. Prediction markets evaluate the collective accuracy of the crowd, usually through metrics such as the Brier score. Trepa puts measuring and rewarding individual accuracy first, while still aiming to achieve platform-level accuracy that rivals or even surpasses prediction markets for numerical outcomes.

In that sense, the relationship between prediction markets and Trepa’s accuracy-based, pari-mutuel, precision-prediction model is likely more complementary than adversarial. Prediction markets expect users to trade probabilities to surface private information as a platform-wide signal while Trepa expects users to deliver a point estimate, which can then be aggregated into a summary statistic like the average or the median or more sophisticated versions thereof. Each format captures a different aspect of how humans forecast. Together they form a richer ecosystem for understanding the future.

TL;DR: Trepa is, at its heart, a competition in the same spirit as the 1906 Plymouth ox-weight contest. It is fundamentally about individual accuracy. By encouraging each participant to give their best possible numerical estimate, Trepa produces an aggregate signal that benefits from the wisdom of crowds. The resulting “best guess forecast” should, over time, track the true outcome remarkably well.

What’s next

• Catch the Trepa team IRL at Solana Breakpoint from the 8th to the 14th of December. I’ll be pitching at the Superteam Demo Day on the 13th.

• Keep an eye on our X account for the mainnet launch date announcement.

• We’ll also release our DOCS soon, including some of the exact math behind our convex, accuracy-score and time-weighted pari-mutuel funding mechanism (yes, it’s a mouthful).

Thanks for reading this far. See you in the trenches. LFG.

P.S. I just found out that an ox is a castrated bull trained for work. RIP Galton’s ox.

→ Follow us on X
→ Join our Discord
→ Check out our website

This is a post by cofounder Jong.

You’ve been waiting for this moment for months. In December, before Solana Breakpoint, you’ll finally get to see what we’ve been building behind the scenes. For the first time ever, you’ll be able to make precision predictions and stake your forecasting skills for cash and glory. We’re writing this post to prepare you for mainnet and to share what’s been going on.

The important bits

• What is Trepa in one sentence?
  Trepa is the only prediction platform that ties payouts directly to numerical accuracy: the closer you get, the bigger you win.

• Why should you care?
  The world runs on numbers, but binary bets can’t truly reward accuracy because they are too blunt. Trepa’s “precision predictions” turn your numerical accuracy into cash and clout.

• Launch date?
  To be announced via X in the next few days. Make sure to follow us on X and turn on notifications.

• Audited?
  🫡 Oui, by Adevar Labs.

• How can I prepare?
  Get some USDC on Solana mainnet in your favorite SVM wallet or CEX account.

• Can I skip the rest of this email?
  Yes, unless you want Trepa’s origin story.

The story so far

Leon (cofounder) and I met on the r/PolymarketHQ subreddit in November 2024, geeking over Polymarket trading data, and that Reddit conversation became the starting point for Trepa.

The Trepa team made its first public appearance at the end of November last year when we pitched a Telegram mini-app for predicting opinion poll results at the Bybit X DMCC Web3 Unleashed hackathon in Dubai. The pitch went well and we snagged the 2nd place and $48.5k in prizes.

We then went on to win 1st place in Sonic SVM’s MOBIUS hackathon in the Attention Capital Markets track, and shortly after, we won again 1st place in the very first Solana hackathon in Korea hosted by Superteam Korea. We received $80k and $10k in prizes respectively, both in April.

In May and June, we spent six weeks at Balaji’s Network School in Forest City, Malaysia, just outside Singapore. Superteam Singapore invited us, along with around 20 other top-tier early-stage Solana teams, to Ignition Season 3. You can think of it as a very hands-on bootcamp where you get your ass kicked.

Based on the feedback we received, we decided to pivot from subjective prediction targets to numerical, hard-objective targets, especially economic data such as prices, earnings, and macro signals.

This is where we collected real money for the first time. I asked 30 people to guess next week’s gym attendance and stake cash on their predictions. I collected both cash and crypto and redistributed the payouts manually using a simple Google Sheet. It was a ton of manual work, but more importantly, it showed demand for numerical predictions paired with high-payout bets.

A few weeks later, on June 26th, we all took a bus to Singapore and pitched in front of Balaji and around 50 VCs and angels. After the pitches and doing some networking, we all went to eat hot pot at Haidilao. After a few stops at fun bars, the night had to end early for me at around 3 AM because I had to catch a flight from Johor Bahru to Kuala Lumpur at 8 AM. More importantly, I had my third call with the Colosseum team scheduled at 5 AM. My friend Shayn booked me a taxi from Singapore all the way to Forest City (thx bro). I took a quick cold shower to not fall asleep and got on the call with Leon.

A few minutes in, I almost fell out of my seat. We won 1st place in consumer at the Colosseum Breakout hackathon, among 1,412 project submissions, and we were offered a spot in the Colosseum accelerator with a $250k check. Suddenly I was very awake. And of course we took the money. It was a no-brainer.

I landed in Seoul on the afternoon of the 27th. Then I got a Discord message from Yash from Network School. We switched to WhatsApp, got on a call, and learned that Balaji Fund wanted to put in a check. Another $100k secured. One of the wildest 24 hours of my life.

Fast forward to today

We have hundreds of testers who have made thousands of precision predictions in the closed beta, a completed smart contract audit, huge support from across the Solana ecosystem (Foundation, Superteam, Solana Mobile, and many others), and a goated team of A-players.

More than anything, I’m thankful for all the early believers and I’m excited for what is about to happen in the next few days, weeks, and months.

Mainnet is coming. See you in the trenches. LFG.

(Btw, I’ll be at Solana Breakpoint this year presenting Trepa at the Superteam Demo Day. Say ‘hi’!)

→ Follow us on X

→ Join our Discord

→ Check out our website