Reality is a new asset class. ZEIT Finance on vaults and the standard underneath them
ZEIT.FINANCE, this week's featured listing on PM Wisdom, turns prediction-market strategies into vaults you can hold as a single token. Deposit collateral, receive shares, and a manager trades elections, rates, and geopolitics underneath while your position survives every market resolution. Last week the team also published the layer most projects keep to themselves: PMVS, the Prediction Market Vault Standard, a pre-EIP draft that defines the custody, accounting, and settlement rules ZEIT is bui
ZEIT.FINANCE, this week's featured listing on PM Wisdom, turns prediction-market strategies into vaults you can hold as a single token. Deposit collateral, receive shares, and a manager trades elections, rates, and geopolitics underneath while your position survives every market resolution. Last week the team also published the layer most projects keep to themselves: PMVS, the Prediction Market Vault Standard, a pre-EIP draft that defines the custody, accounting, and settlement rules ZEIT is built on, released into the public domain. We put our questions to ZEIT Finance, about marking thin markets honestly and why the team gave the spec away.
Disclosure: ZEIT.FINANCE is the current featured listing on PM Wisdom. This interview is editorial content. It is not financial advice, and a High trust rating is an editorial confidence label, not a safety guarantee.
PM Wisdom: For readers meeting ZEIT for the first time: what is it?
ZEIT Finance: A marketplace for Perpetual Prediction Vaults. A vault is a prediction-market strategy packaged behind one ERC-20 share. Instead of holding a drawer full of contracts that expire on election night, you hold a single token that represents your share of the whole strategy, and the manager keeps trading underneath it. One token, one worldview.
Your tagline is "Reality is a new asset class." What do you mean by that?
Prediction markets already price reality better than almost anything else. What they don't do is let you invest in it. Every market expires. Every thesis is scattered across dozens of contracts. Once you package those positions behind a perpetual share with a continuous price, exposure to real-world events starts to behave like an asset class: you can hold it, size it, compare managers, and plug it into the rest of DeFi. Reality doesn't expire. Your exposure to it shouldn't either.
Walk us through a deposit.
You deposit collateral, currently USDC.e on Polygon. The deposit doesn't convert right away. It sits in a queue and gets processed at the next roll, which happens every 24 hours. At the roll, the vault computes its net asset value, derives a price per share, and mints your shares at exactly that price. Withdrawals mirror it: you queue a redemption and the vault funds it from idle collateral, from netting against incoming deposits, or by selling positions. If the manager doesn't free collateral in time, an automated unwind reduces positions in batches so redemptions get paid.
Why the daily batch? Instant liquidity is the DeFi default.
Because instant liquidity against thin orderbooks is how you get robbed. If the vault repriced continuously and settled instantly, every deposit and withdrawal would be an invitation to front-run the strategy at the expense of the other holders. Batching at a roll checkpoint means everyone in the same window gets the same honest price, and execution can be planned instead of forced. It's the boring, fund-like answer, and it's the correct one.
"Honest price" is doing a lot of work there. How do you mark a position when the book is three orders deep?
We publish two numbers and we're explicit about the difference. Paper NAV marks positions at reference prices and ignores depth. Impact-aware NAV walks the book and simulates actually unwinding the position, price impact included. Operations run on the impact-aware number, because that's what the portfolio is worth if you had to exit. A lot of pain in this industry comes from marking portfolios at prices nobody could realize. We built the honest number into the core of the system instead of leaving it as a footnote.
Who runs the strategies?
Managers, and we define that broadly on purpose. Individuals, funds, and increasingly agents and AIs. A manager expresses a worldview: they buy, sell, hedge, and rebalance before markets resolve, taking profit or cutting risk as new information arrives. When a market resolves, the vault collects the payout and redeploys into new markets, so the strategy outlives any single question. Our job is to give managers real infrastructure and to give holders a share price that tells the truth.
Underneath all of this sits PMVS, the standard you published last week. What is it, and why does a product need a standard?
PMVS is the Prediction Market Vault Standard: a pre-EIP draft that defines the custody, accounting, and asynchronous settlement rules for ERC-20 vault shares backed by prediction-market positions. It's the foundation ZEIT is built on. We wrote the product first, and the standard is everything building it taught us, written down so it doesn't have to stay ours. If this asset class is real, other teams will build vaults like these, and integrators shouldn't have to trust each team's private conventions about what a share means.
DeFi already has ERC-4626 for vaults. Why isn't that enough?
Because the underlying asset behaves like nothing ERC-4626 was designed for. A winner-take-all outcome token resolves to zero or one unit of collateral and then stops changing with the market entirely. A rolling strategy needs one investor token that survives those resolutions. Add that the biggest venue matches orders offchain and that settlement has to be asynchronous, and you're outside what existing standards describe. PMVS builds on the Boring Vault separation of shares, accounting, and asset control, and it reuses ERC-4626 conventions for conversion and rounding. We standardized the part that's genuinely new.
What does a PMVS vault contract actually do?
Deliberately little. The contracts hold requests, issue shares, and fund claims. They never query venues, never interpret market data, never calculate NAV. A replaceable backend inventories every declared custody account, computes the valuation, and proposes a price and a batch. The contracts then recalculate every output from their own request state and reserve the assets before anyone can claim. The backend supplies evidence; an independent verifier compares that evidence with the transaction and the resulting state. The contract enforces what is valid. Offchain systems can only submit.
The spec has a line I want to ask about: "PMVS attributes claims, not truth."
It means we're precise about what verification gives you. A PMVS record won't tell you a strategy is good or a mark is prophetic. It tells you who claimed what, based on which captured evidence, and it lets anyone re-run the checks. Verification fails closed: an unknown profile, a missing field, an unrecoverable authority, and the claim fails. Missing data must never silently become a zero or an empty inventory. That sounds bureaucratic until you remember how much money has been lost to portfolios marked at fantasy prices, with nobody able to say who asserted them or from what data.
You released the whole thing CC0 and you're taking it down the EIP path. Why give it away?
A standard you have to license isn't a standard. We want the sharpest review we can get, from vault builders, venue teams, auditors, and people who think we're wrong. The repo is public and the schemas are machine-readable. Pre-EIP review is the stage where criticism is cheapest. If someone breaks our settlement assumptions on paper, that's a gift. The alternative is someone breaking them in production.
What doesn't any of this fix?
Most of what matters day to day. Our own docs open with it: prediction-market vaults are risk assets. Odds swing hard. Thin books cost real money to exit, however carefully you execute. Managers exercise discretion, and smart contracts carry their own risk. What the standard does is make those risks legible. Powers are explicit, every claim has a named author, and the marks tell you what an exit would actually pay. Legible is not the same as gone. Nobody should put money here that they can't afford to see drawn down.
What does success look like in two years?
Independent PMVS implementations we didn't write, on venues we didn't pick, passing the same verification. Prediction markets found product-market fit pricing single events. The next layer, funds and structured products and a real derivatives stack, needs a share token everyone can trust the same way. If "PMVS-conformant" becomes something auditors say without thinking of ZEIT specifically, we've won.
Last one. A PM Wisdom reader is curious. Where should they start?
Two paths. Investors: read our docs, and start with the risk page, not the vault directory. Understand what a roll is and how the vault marks its book before you deposit anything. Builders and reviewers: the PMVS repo. Core for the invariants, Settlement for how requests become funded claims, and M1 for the marking arithmetic. Then tell us what's wrong with it. That's why we published.
Published by PM Wisdom. Check out ZEIT Finance on PM Wisdom for the full listing, trust rating, and editorial review.