Manifold Markets

This page is general information, not financial, investment, legal, tax or betting advice. It explains how the platform works and dates each claim. Verify the current rules and terms on Manifold before you rely on them.

The quick answer, plainly put.

Manifold Markets is a play money prediction platform where anyone can create a market on almost any question and where users trade a site currency called mana to express how likely they think each outcome is. There is no cash at risk and no cash payout, so the appeal is learning and competition rather than profit. As of February 2026 the platform is mana only, after it ran and then closed a real money sweepstakes layer called Sweepcash between September 2024 and 28 March 2025 (per Manifold's own posts and reputable reporting, as of February 2026).

That play money design is a deliberate choice, not an accident. By avoiding cash settlement, Manifold keeps itself outside the framework that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission applies to regulated event contract exchanges, and outside most gambling rules. The result is a platform that is open, experimental and genuinely useful for understanding how markets price probability, with the honest trade off that the prices carry less weight than those on a deep cash venue. Below we explain how mana works, what the site costs, what happened with Sweepcash, how charity donations fit in, where it is available, and who it suits.

How Manifold Markets actually works.

What mana is, and why it matters

Mana is the site currency on Manifold, written with the symbol M. It is not money. You cannot buy your way to an advantage that converts into cash, and you cannot withdraw mana to a bank account. New users receive a starting balance of mana when they sign up, and from then on they earn or lose mana by trading on markets and by being right. Mana is best understood as a score that doubles as a stake: it measures how good your forecasting has been, and it is the thing you put at risk when you take a position.

Each market on Manifold asks a real world question with a defined resolution, for example whether a named event will happen by a certain date. You take the yes side or the no side by spending mana, and the market price moves in response. When the question resolves, the people who were on the correct side are paid out in mana from the pool, and the people on the wrong side lose what they staked. Because there is no cash anywhere in this loop, the worst outcome is a lower mana balance and a dent to your forecasting record, never a real financial loss.

Anyone can create a market

The feature that sets Manifold apart from the regulated exchanges is that users, not the platform, create most of the markets. Spending a small amount of mana, any user can open a question, write its resolution criteria, and seed it with a little liquidity so others can trade. This is why the site has enormous breadth, covering politics, technology, science, culture, sports, personal questions and a long tail of niche topics that no regulated venue would ever list. The cost of that openness is variable quality: a market is only as good as the resolution criteria its creator wrote, and a careless question can resolve in a way that feels unfair. Reading the criteria before you trade matters even more here than on a curated exchange.

Reading a price as a probability

Even though the stake is play money, the maths of the price is the same as on a cash exchange. A market priced at 60 percent means the crowd, weighted by how much mana they have committed, judges the event roughly 60 percent likely at that moment. The strip below shows how a yes price reads straight across as a probability. The one caution specific to Manifold is that on thin markets, where little mana is at stake, a single large trader can move the price more than the underlying probability has really changed, so treat low volume markets as rough estimates rather than precise odds.

If you want the underlying idea in more depth, our guides on reading prices and why prices are not predictions apply directly to what you see here.

What it costs, which is nothing in cash.

There is no cash cost to use Manifold for ordinary trading, because there is no cash involved. You do not deposit money, you are not charged a commission in dollars, and a losing trade costs you mana rather than funds from your bank. This is the clearest practical difference from every cash venue in this category and the reason the platform scores so well on cost: the only thing you can lose by trading is play money.

That said, some actions inside the platform do cost mana. Creating certain market types, adding subsidised liquidity to make your market more attractive to traders, and a few promotional features draw down your mana balance, and there have historically been small mana costs attached to specific actions. None of this touches real money. The table below summarises the cost and structure at a glance, with the date we checked it. Because there is no cash leg, you can compare the trading cost here against the real fees on cash venues in our cross platform fees table to see exactly what you are and are not paying for elsewhere.

Manifold Markets at a glance, as of February 2026

Methodology: compiled from Manifold's published documentation and announcement posts and from reputable reporting, read in June 2026. We take no payment from any platform. Manifold changes its rules often; confirm the current terms on the site.

The Sweepcash chapter, and why it closed.

For a period, Manifold was not purely play money. From September 2024 it ran a sweepstakes coin layer called Sweepcash that let eligible users trade a coin which could, under sweepstakes rules, be redeemed for cash. This is the same legal structure that several social casinos use, and it put Manifold briefly into the real money conversation. The experiment did not last. Manifold sunset Sweepcash on 28 March 2025, and the site has been mana only since (per Manifold's own announcement posts and reputable reporting, as of February 2026).

The reasons given were practical rather than dramatic. By the platform's own account, Sweepcash never reached the scale that would justify the compliance and customer support burden it created, and it blurred the platform's identity as a play money venue. Closing it let Manifold return to the simple, open model it was built around. The episode is worth knowing because it explains why some older reviews describe Manifold as a real money or sweepstakes site: that was true for a window of roughly six months, and it is not true now. As of February 2026 the founders have signalled no plan to reintroduce real money settlement, though that is a statement of intent and could change, so we treat any future return to cash as unconfirmed.

Charity, the one real world exit.

The single way mana touches the real world is charitable giving. Through the Manifold for Charity programme, users have been able to convert mana into a donation to a curated list of vetted nonprofit recipients at a rate of about 100 mana to one dollar. This is not a cash out for you, since the money goes to the charity rather than to your account, but it does give a winning mana balance a tangible purpose beyond a leaderboard.

This part is genuinely contested and we flag it as such. The charity conversion has been subject to pressure from payment processors, with reporting that a processor pushed Manifold to treat mana as a closed loop and to remove direct mana to cash charity redemptions, and that the team worked on a more limited, partner list based version to keep the structure legally clean. Whether the programme is open, at what rate, and to which charities has therefore moved over time and depends on available grant funding. Because of that, the honest guidance is to check the current state of the charity option on Manifold itself rather than assume the rate or availability from any review, including this one. What is not in doubt is that there is no path from mana to your own bank account.

Where you can use it, and the legal angle.

Because Manifold is play money with no cash wagering, the availability question is different from the one that applies to a cash exchange. There is no bet to be legal or illegal in the gambling sense, so the platform is broadly available to users around the world who can reach the site and meet its terms, including an age requirement. That is also why Manifold appears in many places where cash event contracts are restricted: there is simply less for a regulator to object to when no money changes hands.

The honest caveat is that the legal treatment of play money prediction sites is not identical everywhere, and a platform can still restrict accounts by location under its own terms. We are not aware of broad bans on accessing Manifold as a play money service as of February 2026, but local rules vary and can change, so the site's own terms are the authority for your location. If your real goal is to trade for cash, this is the wrong platform and our US legality hub and the cash venues we rate are the place to look instead. For how Manifold compares with the regulated alternatives, see Kalshi vs Manifold, Polymarket vs Manifold, Crypto.com vs Manifold and Robinhood vs Manifold.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere.

Manifold suits the learner, the forecaster and the community minded user. If you want to understand how prediction markets price probability without risking a cent, there is no safer place to practise, because the mechanics are real even though the stake is not. It also suits people who enjoy creating their own questions, following a forecasting record over time, or engaging with a lively community around current events. For students, researchers and writers who want to experiment with market design, the openness is a genuine asset, and the breadth of questions is unmatched by any cash venue.

It suits the profit seeker not at all, and that is the point. You cannot make money on Manifold, full stop, so anyone whose goal is financial return should look at the regulated cash exchanges instead and read our reviews of them. It is also a weaker tool if you need the precise, deep liquidity prices that a heavily traded cash market produces, since thin mana markets can be noisier. Used for what it is, a free and open forecasting game, it is excellent; used as a substitute for a cash exchange, it is the wrong instrument.

Our scoring, and what we actually checked

The score of 73 out of 100 is an illustrative editorial example, not investment advice and not a number any platform paid for. It deliberately marks Manifold down on regulation, because it is not a regulated exchange, and on payouts, because there is no cash exit, while marking it up on cost, because trading risks only play money, and on breadth, because the user created market list is vast. To reach it we read Manifold's published documentation and announcement posts and reputable reporting in June 2026, with particular care around the Sweepcash timeline and the charity programme, both of which we mark as dated and, for charity, contested. Where we have not tested a current feature ourselves, we say so rather than imply hands on use we did not have.