Prediction markets have become serious infrastructure everywhere else. The exchange below already works. What it needs now is South African data, South African backing, and people who would rather this was built here than imported.
The window is open, and it is closing
The global platforms are expanding hard, and South Africa is an obvious next stop: a country that argues about the fuel price, the grid and the vote more than almost anywhere, with a currency that makes small stakes interesting and a population that already bets.
When they arrive they will list our questions, priced by people who have never queued for a taxi, settled against whatever data they can scrape from outside. The value of knowing what South Africans think will accrue somewhere else, and the record of what we collectively believed about our own country will sit on a foreign server.
That is avoidable, and only for a while. The advantage of being local is real but not permanent: we know which source is authoritative, which number is disputed, and which question actually matters on a Tuesday. That head start has a shelf life.
This is not a pitch deck
Everything below is running right now, on this domain, and every claim on this page can be checked from the public pages.
71live questionsacross 6 categories
5settle themselvesno human in the loop
14public sourcesnamed before anyone bets
100%collateralisedno credit, ever
A real matching engine with a central limit order book. Automatic settlement from live public sources. Brier scoring, reliability curves and skill scores computed from the raw tables on every page load. A published methodology and a pre-registered analysis plan, fingerprinted and archived at the Internet Archive before a single question resolved.
That last one is worth pausing on. We wrote down what we expected to find, and how we would know if we were wrong, before we could see the answers. Almost nobody does that. It means the numbers this produces are evidence rather than marketing.
This is an exploration, and the board is the instrument
Every question here is a bet on a source as much as on an outcome. To list one we have to find a number that is published on a schedule, defined the same way each time, and available to anyone who looks. Then we put money on it and find out whether that holds: whether the release lands when it says it will, whether the definition quietly drifts, whether last month's figure is revised after people have already acted on it.
71 questions in, we have found fragments. A weekly dam level. A monthly inflation print. A fuel price set by formula. A lottery prize breakdown declared under audit. Each one is a piece of working public infrastructure, and each one took real effort to verify before a cent could ride on it.
Most of it is already paid for. Stats SA, the Department of Water and Sanitation, the Electoral Commission, Eskom: these are funded by people who pay tax, and the numbers they produce are a public asset rather than a courtesy. Publishing them promptly, consistently and in a form a citizen can actually use is not generosity. It is the work.
And what reaches the public is a fraction of what gets collected. The gaps are not obscure or academic. They are the things people decide on: what a basket of groceries costs where you live, whether the clinic has stock this week, when the water is coming back, which road is closed, how long the queue is at Home Affairs. Households plan on rumour and WhatsApp because the figure exists in a spreadsheet nobody published.
So the empty space on this board is the finding. A question we cannot list is a number nobody is publishing well enough to settle against, and every one of those is on the record here. As the catalogue grows it becomes a public map of which South African data can bear weight and which cannot, which is worth having whatever happens to the market around it.
Some of the gaps are honest ones. Measuring is expensive, and a bad number published confidently is worse than no number at all. But a great deal of it is a file that simply never gets posted, or gets posted as a scanned PDF, or moves without notice. Naming that is part of the point.
What is actually missing
Not the technology. Not the players. Data, and permission to use it.
A question can only be listed if one public source publishes one unambiguous number on one known date. Hold that line honestly and most of what South Africa argues about falls away, not because it does not matter but because nobody publishes it in a form anyone can settle against.
Somewhere out there a company already knows, on a schedule and measured properly, what a basket of groceries costs in Khayelitsha, how many trucks crossed Beitbridge, what the grid did overnight, how many units were actually completed. That is the bottleneck, and it is the one thing we cannot solve alone.
Five ways in
You produce data
For statisticians, research houses, industry bodies, and the public departments already collecting far more than they publish.
You have spent years making a number trustworthy and it probably gets read by a few hundred people who already agree it matters. Put it here and the country prices it. You get something a download count cannot: proof that people will put money behind believing your numbers, a credit on every market it settles, and a public record of how close the crowd got to your series. If your data is as good as you think it is, this is where that becomes visible.
If you sit inside a department: we are not asking for anything confidential, or for anything new to be measured. We are asking for what already exists to arrive on time, in a consistent format, at a stable address. That is a smaller ask than it sounds and it is worth more to the public than another annual report.
For bookmakers, betting exchanges and operators already regulated in South Africa.
You have the licence, the compliance function and the payment rails. We have a working exchange, a differentiated catalogue nobody else lists, automatic settlement, and evidence that people trade it. Those two halves are worth considerably more together than apart, and the half you are missing is the one that takes years to build rather than months to license. Whether that ends in a partnership, a white label or an acquisition is a conversation worth having early.
For angels, funds and operators who back categories before they are categories.
There is no licensed prediction market in South Africa. Not a small one, not a struggling one: none. The regulatory path is narrow and we have mapped it. The technology is built and running. The evidence is being gathered under a plan that was published before the results existed. What is missing is the capital to move at the speed the window allows, and the unglamorous truth is that whoever is first here with a licence and a catalogue will be very hard to displace.
For brands looking for something better than a logo on a billboard.
Sponsor a season, or a single board. The standings are public, permanent and scored on accuracy rather than luck, so you are attaching yourself to a number that can be checked rather than an impression that cannot. It is a small budget for an association with rigour, and it directly funds the thing that makes people take a forecast seriously.
For the users whose feedback is worth more than their traffic.
A question that reads two ways. A market that settled badly. A source that went stale. A screen that made no sense on your phone. Every serious improvement to this platform so far has come from somebody taking two minutes to say what was broken, and we would rather hear it bluntly than not at all.
YaNoBru takes nothing today. No house edge, no rake, no deposits, no withdrawals. Play money and a scoreboard. Nobody can lose a rand here because there are no rands here.
There is no prize money either, and the budget is a server and a domain paid for personally. Anything raised goes to two things: buying access to better data, and putting real prizes on the boards so that being right is worth the effort of being careful.
That is the current position, not a permanent one. A licensed exchange has to earn its keep eventually, and the whole point of this phase is to find out whether the demand is there before anyone asks a regulator, or an investor, to take that on faith.