Solana-based TBD, a prediction market protocol for 'verified' human opinion, raises $3 million

TBD, a Solana-based prediction market protocol focused on "verified" human opinion through polling, has raised $3 million in a seed round and launched publicly after concluding its private beta.

The seed round was co-led by CMT Digital and ParaFi, with participation from Jump Crypto. CMT and ParaFi each received board observer seats, TBD co-founder and CEO Corey Miller told The Block. The round closed earlier this month, Miller said, declining to disclose the structure of the investment or the valuation.

The seed follows an earlier $800,000 angel round that included Slow Ventures general partner Sam Lessin, Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, Polygon Labs CEO Mark Boiron, Wintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy, and dYdX founder Antonio Juliano, Miller said.

Miller, a former dYdX product and growth lead, began building TBD last year with Taehoon Lee, a former senior engineering team member at dYdX. The name TBD — short for "To Be Decided" — reflects the startup's view that its polls are a mechanism for discovering human truths and perspectives that exist across humanity rather than being shaped by algorithms, Miller said.

Polling and prediction markets

At its core, TBD offers verified polling paired with permissionless prediction market trading.

Polls are conducted through a World ID–gated voting mini-app, meaning only uniquely verified humans can vote. Prediction markets are hosted on a separate platform where users can trade on the outcomes of those polls. The poll and the corresponding market launch simultaneously and close at the same time.

Every prediction market on TBD is tied to a poll. "We aren't offering event-based markets" like other prediction market platforms such as Polymarket or Kalshi, Miller said. "We are only, currently, offering markets on the polls we are organizing. You are explicitly betting on the outcomes of these ‘digital elections’ that we are running at scale. Thats a product you can't get elsewhere."

Only voting is gated by World ID, issued by Sam Altman's World (formerly Worldcoin), Miller said. Trading remains open to anyone, including automated systems.

"The internet is flooded with synthetic content, and measuring what real people think is an increasingly difficult task. We are building TBD to discover human sentiment in a digitally native, AI-resistant, and economically sustainable manner," Miller said.

TBD said its private beta concluded with more than 4,000 markets created and over 19 million votes cast from more than 225,000 unique participants globally.

Miller said the number of possible markets is effectively unlimited, since any opinion-based question can become a poll. "We can therefore offer many more markets resolving every day than other venues," he noted.

Voters earn USDC for participating. Poll creators fund a prize pool that is distributed among participants, and the larger the prize pool, the more widely the poll is distributed.

TBD also plans to introduce revenue sharing from trading volume so that voters earn more as trading activity increases, Miller said.

"Beyond earning USDC, we are also investing in building out the social side of that app," Miller said. "Making it a place for humans to connect and debate with other humans. Additionally, the groups functionality is a first step in enabling like-minded people of certain verified background to connect with each other (think Subreddits where you prove something about yourself to join)."

While TBD currently supports World ID verification, Miller said the platform is exploring additional verification methods, including zkTLS-based tools.

TBD generates revenue from trading fees. The three-person team is based in New York and plans to roughly double its headcount across engineering and growth roles, Miller said. The protocol currently runs on Solana but has built tools designed to make blockchain interactions invisible to users. The goal, Miller said, is to make TBD accessible from major platforms without users needing to know which network they are on.