What is UltraContracts?

A work of conceptual art. Read before you bet.

Prediction markets are having a moment. Kalshi. Polymarket. The pitch: betting markets aggregate information, reveal truth through prices, and make us better forecasters. If it works for elections and economic data, why not everything?

There’s a simple stress test for any principle: take it to its logical extreme and see if it still holds. So let’s take it there.

Contracts on human life. When does someone die? Tomorrow? Place a bet. In two years? Put your money where your mouth is. Let’s add derivatives. How will they die? Make that market. Where? See who bites.

Next we could do bets on the next terrorist attack? Or perhaps the total bodycount of Ukrainian forces on a specific day? Seems reasonable.

Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara — Kalshi’s founders — believe we can financially instrumentalize all facets of life into the logic of marketplace and wagers. Fine — but murder, carnage and mayhem is as much a part of human life as anything else. If the market can exist, it should... right?

Better yet, open a market on when the next serial killer surfaces. Place over-unders on the body count. Surely all parties will resist the temptation to participate in that betting market. Imagine the psychopath in his 70s-era roadside motel, staring at the odds, thinking “looks good on 10.” Or the degenerate detective who has the under and decides that the latest body really, really isn’t related to the spree.

Politician sex scandals, celebrity overdoses, genocide body counts, your boss, your mother-in-law. Some of these markets would admittedly be pretty small. But the logic says they should exist.

That’s the failure. The paradox of these marketplaces is what happens when the outcomes can be wagered on and manipulated by the participants themselves. The NBA learned this — referees, players, coaches suspended and criminally charged for fixing games they had action on. A large enough position creates a rational incentive to act.

So I Built the Thing

In the spirit of Mansour and Lopes Lara, I’ve built the first truly open prediction marketplace — where any market can be made if enough users seed it. Paper credits only. No real money ever changes hands. But the structure is real.

Every user starts with 10,000 credits and 5/5 soul fragments. That’s all you get. Blow up your account, and you can sell a piece of your soul to buy back in. You can do this five times. On the fifth sale, you become a Wraith — someone who has sold everything.

Wraiths can keep playing by trading fragments of their soul for credits. Each buy-back descends you one level through hell. Hell Level -1. Hell Level -2. Infinitely.

Your soul status is visible everywhere — comments, leaderboard, next to your positions. The platform makes the invisible cost of compulsive behavior visible and literal. Real event outcome wagering platforms don’t show you your soul status. They show you your balance.

Why Bother?

An argument you can interact with is more persuasive than one you can only read. The more this looks like a legitimate fintech product, the more effective the critique. That uncanny valley between “real platform” and “dystopian thought experiment” — that’s the art. It is meant to feel horrific, or banal, or both.

We do not condone the threatening, mocking, or implied taking of human life. The uncomfortable markets that may appear here are doing the work of the argument — not because we endorse them, but because their existence is the point.

Societies have regulated gambling for reasons we are forgetting. This is a reminder.

You can reach me through my profile if you’d like to talk about the future. And Tarek, Luana — if you’re reading this, I’d love to hear where you think the line is.

— Aakash

UltraContracts is a work of conceptual art. All credits are fictional. No real money, no real contracts, no real commitments. The markets are thought experiments, not offers.