Prediction markets get a new twist: betting on what's already happened

Prediction markets have spent years teaching people to wager on the future. A new startup wants them to bet on the past.

Verifact Markets, which emerged from stealth last week, is positioning itself as a distinct alternative to platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. Rather than asking traders to forecast what will happen, Verifact centers each market on a specific factual claim about an event that has already occurred, but where people genuinely disagree about what is true.

The company's founding concept is straightforward: "For the first time, you can trade on disputed facts, help determine what's true or false, submit evidence, and make a profit," Peter Wokwicz, CEO of Positron Capital Management, the family office that backs Verifact Markets, wrote on LinkedIn.

Wokwicz, a seasoned leader with an extensive career in technology and finance, conceived the idea and has been central to bringing it to market. Day-to-day operations are led by Rodrigo Aquino, CEO and co-founder of Verifact Markets. "It was a five-year journey from idea to launch," Wokwicz wrote on LinkedIn, "and only with the recent advancements of AI, some regulatory clarity, and the very best team putting it all together could this dream have become a reality."

How the markets work

Each Verifact market frames a disputed factual statement , such as whether a specific event occurred as reported, or whether a public claim was accurate. Traders buy a "True" or "False" contract, priced between $0 and $1. A contract pays $1 if the market resolves in that direction, and $0 if it doesn't. Prices shift as evidence is submitted, reviewed, and weighed by the platform.

Resolution is where Verifact claims its edge. The company uses a patent-pending system combining evidence collected by its own technology with signals from trading activity. A market resolves only when Verifact reaches a confidence threshold (the company cites greater than 90%) in either outcome. If that bar is never cleared, the market expires and traders receive a settlement based on the last trusted trading price, rather than a binary win or lose.

Users can also submit evidence they believe is relevant, though Verifact evaluates whether submissions meet its standards for relevance and verifiability before including them in the resolution process.

A new category in a crowded space

The broader prediction market industry has expanded rapidly.

As of July 2026, prediction markets are not legally considered betting or gambling markets in the United States, with companies framing themselves as fairer and more transparent than traditional sportsbooks. However, regulators are showing greater scrutiny of the market and as recently as September 22, 2026, the CFTC released a staff advisory on ‘mention markets’ involving bets on specific words used in speeches.

Verifact is carving out a narrower but arguably more contentious niche: markets on questions where the answer should theoretically exist, but where competing interpretations, incomplete records, or motivated reasoning have made the truth genuinely contested.

The platform's own example (whether COVID-19 originated in a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology) illustrates both the ambition and the exposure.

That ambition carries real risk for traders. Verifact's disclaimer makes clear that its resolution process does not constitute an authoritative determination of truth in every context, and that markets are resolved on the best available evidence at the time. Once a market closes, its outcome is final and cannot be appealed, and evidence that surfaces afterward will not reopen it.

Trading on Verifact Markets involves risk. Participants may lose the full amount paid to enter a trade, including applicable fees.

For financial advisors tracking the expanding universe of alternative trading platforms and how emerging fintech is reshaping investor behavior the model raises a practical question: what happens when the "fact" a market was built on turns out to be more complicated than the evidence suggested?