Start with what you already know.
You buy a share of Apple. The price reflects what the market thinks Apple is worth. When Apple has good news the price goes up. When it has bad news the price goes down. You can hold the share forever, or you can sell it tomorrow. There is no expiry date.
You bet on a Polymarket question. "Will Drake drop an album by Q3?" The contract pays $1 if yes, nothing if no. It resolves on a date and disappears. You cannot hold a long position on Drake's career; you can only hold a short-dated bet on one specific outcome.
People Markets is the first one. Not the second.
What the price actually means.
Every listed person has a number that moves continuously. We call it the mark. The mark is anchored to a public index of how that person is trending across the metrics that matter for their category. For a musician: streams, chart positions, mentions, follows, search volume. For a politician: polls, approval ratings, primary results, headline-share. For a creator: subscribers, view-time, engagement, brand-deal flow.
The mark is not whatever traders feel like. It is the orderflow plus the events plus the index, weighted. If the price drifts away from where the catalog says it should be, funding rates pull it back. If a real-world thing happens, the mark moves to reflect it. Nobody has to declare what the price "should" be. The market discovers it, with a tether to reality.
A position you can hold forever.
You buy $DRAKE at 183. Drake drops an album, the mark moves to 187, you sell. You made $4 a share, less fees. That part is just like a stock. The mechanism that keeps the mark anchored to reality is called a perpetual future, and it works through funding rates: a small periodic payment between long and short holders that pulls the contract toward its underlying.
The practical version is simpler:
- You can hold forever. No expiry date. No re-listing. No "this market closes on Tuesday".
- You can short. If you think someone is overpriced, you can take a short position the same way you take a long one.
- You can leverage. Up to 5× on most subjects. Liquidations are public and pre-priced.
- You can pair-trade. Long Kendrick, short Drake, in one click. The spread is its own instrument.
If you have ever traded a perpetual future on crypto, this will feel familiar. If you have ever bet on Polymarket, the difference is that this position never resolves. You can just keep holding, with the price continuously updating, for as long as the subject remains listed.
A worked example.
Friday, 11:59pm. The album leaks.
- 11:59 PMLeak hits Twitter. $DRAKE is at 183.
- 12:02 AMBuying pressure pushes the mark to 188.4. Funding rate ticks up.
- 12:04 AM"Album drops by Q3" event resolves YES. Pre-priced nudge: +1.4% to the mark.
- 12:18 AMFirst-night Spotify count posts to the index. Mark holds at 191.
- 12:31 AMNew event listed: "Will the album debut at #1?" Markets feed back into markets.
- 02:14 AM$DRAKE settles at 191.6. Half a percent above where the catalog says it should be. Funding will pull it back if it stays.
This is the loop: real things happen, the market reflects them, the market spawns the next thing to trade.
"But isn't this kind of weird?"
Probably. New instruments often are. Stock futures were weird in 1972. Event contracts were weird in 2014. What we are listing has the same shape: an underlying that already moves, an audience that already trades opinions about it, and a missing instrument that turns out to fit.
The harder version of the question is whether listing a person is a kind of indignity to the person. We think the answer depends on what the listing rules are. Civilians, minors, medical events, anyone who asks to be delisted: out. Public figures whose public visibility already makes them market-relevant: in, on terms they can shape. See the For Subjects page for the full answer.
The honest version.
We think a market on people is going to feel obvious in retrospect. Sports has one. Stocks have one. Crypto has one. The cultural and political trajectory of the people who shape culture and politics has nothing.
We are building the venue. The boring parts first: settlement, oracles, listing rules, KYC. Then the catalog: who gets listed, why, on what terms, with what consent. Then the interesting parts: pair trades, event contracts, the data API.
When the market exists and trades fairly, the price of $DRAKE will mean something. The spread between $KENDRICK and $DRAKE will mean something. That is the prize, and the work is mostly the unromantic preparation for it.