TBD Launches $3M AI-Proof Market to Uncover Human Truth

NEW YORK, NY – February 25, 2026 – A new venture named TBD has officially launched its platform after a successful private beta, armed with $3 million in seed funding to tackle one of the digital age's most pressing problems: distinguishing genuine human opinion from the noise of bots and artificial intelligence. The company is pioneering a new category of prediction market focused exclusively on verified human sentiment.

The funding round was led by industry investors CMT Digital and ParaFi, with participation from Jump Crypto. The capital infusion coincides with the platform's public opening, which follows a beta phase that garnered over 19 million votes from more than 225,000 unique participants across 4,000 markets.

As AI-generated content floods social media, news feeds, and comment sections, the ability to accurately gauge public opinion has been severely compromised. TBD aims to restore trust in sentiment data by creating an economic market around it, where every participant is a provably unique person.

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

A New Market Beyond Bets and Bots

Prediction markets, which allow users to trade on the outcomes of future events, have gained popularity for forecasting everything from election results to sports championships. However, TBD is expanding this concept into uncharted territory. Instead of focusing on external events, its markets are built around the outcomes of global polls answered exclusively by its verified user base.

The process integrates polling and trading into a single workflow. An individual or organization can launch a poll on the platform, and simultaneously, a Solana-based prediction market is created where users can trade on what they believe the final poll results will be. This system creates a powerful feedback loop, aligning economic incentives with the aggregation of real human opinions and turning abstract sentiment into a measurable, market-driven asset.

"The TBD team has the rare combination of deep mechanism-design thinking and relentless product velocity," noted Sam Hallene, Partner at lead investor CMT Digital. "TBD turns verified human sentiment into a market, which we believe will become instrumental as AI erodes trust in traditional data sources."

The potential applications extend far beyond simple curiosity. Businesses could use the platform to conduct bot-resistant market research on product features, while policymakers could gather more reliable feedback on public initiatives. The platform’s ability to provide a clear, tradable signal on what a verified group of people truly believes could become a valuable tool for decision-making across industries.

The Double-Edged Sword of Verification

The technological cornerstone of TBD's promise of "verified human sentiment" is its integration with World ID, a digital identity protocol designed to prove "humanness" online. Developed by Worldcoin, World ID primarily uses a physical iris scan performed by a device called the Orb to generate a unique cryptographic proof of personhood. This allows users to verify their identity on connected platforms like TBD without revealing their personal data, thanks to privacy-preserving technologies like Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

This biometric verification is TBD's primary defense against the Sybil attacks that plague many online platforms, where a single entity can create countless fake accounts to manipulate polls or conversations. By ensuring that one person equals one vote, the system offers a robust solution to the problem of AI and bot-driven content.

However, this reliance on World ID also ties TBD's reputation to a technology that has faced significant global scrutiny. Privacy advocates and regulators in several countries, including Kenya, Spain, and South Korea, have raised concerns about the mass collection of sensitive, immutable biometric data. While Worldcoin asserts that its system is designed for privacy and that raw biometric images are deleted, the long-term security and ethical implications of building a global identity system on iris scans remain a subject of intense debate.

From DeFi Vets to Sentiment Pioneers

Navigating the complex technical and economic challenges of building such a platform requires deep expertise, which TBD's founders, Corey Miller and Taehoon Lee, honed at dYdX, one of the world's leading decentralized exchanges. Their experience in building and scaling a high-volume, sophisticated DeFi protocol provides them with a strong foundation in mechanism design, on-chain architecture, and product execution.

Building a successful prediction market relies on carefully crafted economic incentives that encourage participation and reward accuracy. The founders' background in the high-stakes environment of decentralized derivatives trading suggests they possess the necessary skills to design a sustainable and resilient protocol. This track record was a key factor for investors.

"ParaFi has backed prediction markets since 2018 and believe they are a natural extension of capital markets, bringing transparent, incentive-aligned pricing to future outcomes," stated Anjan Vinod, Managing Director at ParaFi. "We're excited to back this team, whose track record of bringing thoughtful, well-executed DeFi products to market gives us conviction in their ability to scale TBD."

The High-Speed, High-Stakes Choice of Solana

TBD's decision to build its protocol on the Solana blockchain is a strategic one, aimed at providing the performance necessary for a platform intended for mass participation. Solana is known for its high transaction throughput and low fees, which are critical for an application that could generate millions of micro-transactions from votes and trades. This allows for a seamless user experience without the high costs or slow confirmation times associated with other blockchains.

This choice, however, is not without its trade-offs. Solana has faced criticism for a series of network outages and periods of instability in its history, which could pose a risk to a live market platform where uptime is crucial. Furthermore, debates persist in the blockchain community regarding Solana's degree of decentralization compared to networks like Ethereum. For TBD, the benefits of speed and scalability appear to outweigh these risks, representing a calculated bet that the network's performance will support its ambitious vision for a global sentiment market.

By organizing global opinion into transparent and tradable markets, TBD is embarking on a mission to surface deeper truths about collective belief. In an era where digital authenticity is increasingly scarce, the platform offers a novel framework for understanding what the world really thinks.