Markets are tools for aggregating information. Over the past few years, a diverse ecosystem of information markets has emerged, each designed to extract a different kind of signal from a crowd.
Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi ask: how likely is this to happen? Participants bet on outcomes, probabilities become public, and the market resolves to a binary result.
Opinion markets ask: what do people think or prefer?
Decision markets like MetaDAO go further by letting participants trade on the expected impact of different decisions, with outcomes determined by which option is predicted to produce better measurable results.
Hyperstition markets explore how belief itself can shape reality, where the act of collectively expecting something can make it more likely to occur.
Attention markets, meanwhile, treat visibility as the scarce resource, surfacing what a crowd considers worth focusing on.
But across all of them, one type of signal has remained stubbornly difficult to collect: private, high-conviction insight — the kind of information that only has value precisely because it isn’t public.
Opportunity markets are designed to surface exactly this, by incentivizing participants to contribute and stake on ideas, while keeping the underlying data private to the market creator.
This is the gap Bench is built to fill.
What is an Opportunity Market?
The concept was first formally proposed by Dave White and Matt Liston at Paradigm. Their core observation: the people who first spot valuable opportunities rarely have any way to monetize that insight, and the institutions with resources to act have no way to find those people. Their solution is a private prediction market where prices are visible only to the sponsor — letting a crowd surface high-signal information without leaking it to competitors. It’s worth reading in full here.
Bench takes this idea and builds a live, on-chain market around it — powered by Arcium to make privacy guarantees cryptographically enforced. Where prediction markets output public probabilities and resolve to a binary outcome, Bench aggregates insights, resolves subjectively, and rewards useful signals revealed only to the market creator.
The goal isn’t to produce a probability visible to everyone. It’s to give one person — the creator — access to the best information a crowd can surface, privately. Built on Solana and powered by Arcium, Bench is the first market of this kind, and it changes what information markets can actually be used for.
How a market works
A creator launches a market with a prize pool and an initial set of options — the possible answers or directions they’re considering.
From there, the market opens up. Both the creator and participants can introduce new options, meaning the market can expand with information the creator hadn’t even thought to ask about.
Participants then stake on whichever option they believe in. Staking isn’t just a financial action — it’s a signal. It tells the market creator where informed people are putting their conviction.
How rewards work
When the market resolves, rewards go to the most valuable signals, not simply the most popular ones. The creator decides what was useful. Within a winning option, payouts are split according to each participant’s share of capital — and early stakers receive a multiplier for committing sooner.
There is no slashing. Participants are never punished for being wrong, only rewarded for being useful.
Why privacy changes everything
This is where Arcium comes in. In most market designs, market information and odds are visible to everyone which defeats the purpose for any creator who needs an edge. If the insight is public, it isn’t an edge anymore.
Bench uses Arcium to ensure that market data remains private to the market creator. No one else sees what the crowd is pointing to. The creator gets access to aggregated high-value, crowdsourced information without leaking it — turning Bench into a competitive intelligence tool, and unlocking something information markets have never quite been able to deliver.
Bench is essentially a prediction market that doesn’t resolve to binary outcomes, but to subjective evaluations, where participants stake on options and all the market’s information goes exclusively to the creator. The market creator then rewards what they believe is the most useful information, and those who staked on those options get rewarded, while everyone else gets refunded.
New markets are possible with encrypted compute.
Bench is now live on Devnet with Bench Alpha.
If you were on the waitlist, you now have access. If not, sign up below.
Website: bench.markets
Keep up to date: https://x.com/benchdotgames
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