The thesis: be the anchor, not the venue
The perp stack has unbundled into three layers: distribution (the front-end), the venue (the matching engine), and the oracle (the index a contract settles to). The first two are commoditizing; anyone can deploy a perp in an afternoon. The unsolved layer is the third: a settlement price for long-tail assets that cannot be cheaply manipulated. Recent history makes the point. In 2026, two live perp products on exactly these asset classes failed on their index, not their engine: a pre-IPO perp flash-crashed roughly 45% on a single bad oracle input (its feed was mostly an EMA of its own mark price), and a real-estate perp lost ~97% of its TVL on a thin point-estimate index. Mecone exists to be the layer that would have saved both: we do not run a venue, we license the settlement reference to the venues already racing to list these markets.Why a prediction market makes a good oracle
- Depth is the defense. The index is derived from an aggregated order book, so moving it means paying real money against the whole book, and we measure that cost per index.
- A full distribution, not a point. We publish the crowd’s entire implied probability distribution, which powers confidence bands and circuit breakers, not just a single number.
- Anchored to reality. Each anchored index glides from the last official print toward the live crowd value and settles to the exact official series its market resolves on, so a manipulated print mean-reverts by construction.
- Stored and reproducible. Every published value is a tick in an immutable, append-only series. Any settlement can be replayed.
What is live today
Mecone is backed by a16z Speedrun.