Originally posted on Bodhi Twitter, Dec 12, 2024
Hey everyone, we’re launching something truly new — a product that’s never existed before, not in crypto, not in human history.
If aliens visit Earth 100 years from now to pick the most important product of each year, 2024 belongs to this one.
This thread is an invitation for you, for whoever is reading this, including @vitalik, to join this great journey.
The product we’re talking about is called Wishpool. It’s simply a 100-line contract on blockchain.
But what makes it different is that it uses memes and trading to solve real societal problems. I’m calling it a “market-driven bounty protocol.”
In the following post, I will explain:
- the problem it solves,
- how it works,
- where it comes from,
- how the launch is progressing,
- what you can do to join
1. Problems Wishpool Solves
Problem 1: Funding public goods
Solving problems costs money.
When the business itself isn’t profitable, the source of funds becomes a problem, even if everyone benefits from the results. Public goods funding often relies almost entirely on donations, which themselves need a source.
Problem 2: The limits of memecoins
Memecoins are popular and widely traded. They often emerge from concepts that capture people’s attention.
But these coins only reflect what’s happening—they lack the ability to shape or change reality.
When these problems intersect, they create a solution.
Wishpool turns the market’s speculative energy—often centered around ideas or concepts—into funding for real-world problems.
What people trade may seem like wishes, but in essence, they represent “the future when the wish is fulfilled.”
2. How Wishpool Works
The way Wishpool works is simple:
- Describe a measurable task (“wish”).
- The wish becomes a tradable token (“share”), with its price following a curve.
- Each wish has a reward pool, starting with 1 share. Donations can add more shares.
- People submit solutions to the wish. The wish creator allocates reward shares from the reward pool to those solutions.
You may notice, higher share prices make the reward pool more valuable.
The process is as follows: The market sets the share price; the share price determines the reward pool’s value; the reward pool motivates people to solve the problem. Meanwhile, whether the problem should be solved influences the market in return.
There are two core principles at play here:
- The market drives reality (problem-solving).
- The imagined reality (problem solved) drives the market in return.
3. Examples: Two Types of Wishes
Now I’ll provide two examples of different types of Wishes and explain how they can be used within the app.
Type 1: Targeted Wish
A Targeted Wish refers to a wish where only a specific address can fulfill it and claim the reward pool funds.
Let’s imagine a young person, out of boredom, creates a wish directed at the U.S. President Trump: “Would you dye your hair pink?”
For some reason, everyone finds this wish amusing, and it gets traded to an extremely high price. The total reward pool surpasses $10 million.
Surprisingly, Trump decides to take on the challenge. He dyes his hair pink, uploads a selfie, and clicks Fulfill. He claims the reward shares, which are automatically sold for Ether and sent to his address.
Some might ask, “What if someone cheats and claims a reward without real fulfillment?”
It’s not a big issue — high-value wish target/creators usually have strong reputations, and blockchain transparency ensures that cheating would severely damage their credibility.
Why it matters
This example shows how a large reward pool can motivate someone to do something they originally had no interest in.
While we used a funny example to keep it light, a wish of this scale would reflect more than money—it would represent public opinion on a massive level.
In other words, what Wishpool represents is a completely new form of democracy, one that could potentially become the next generation of democratic systems.
(Isn’t this system easily influenced by big money? Counterintuitively, meme markets are actually one of the most grassroots-driven and least susceptible to large capital influence.)
Type 2: Open Wish
An Open Wish allows anyone to fulfill the wish and submit a solution. Only the creator of the wish can allocate funds from the reward pool to submissions.
Let’s look at an example: an organization dedicated to curing cancer creates a wish: “Can someone fix cancer?”
Due to the broad awareness of the issue and its immense positive externalities, this wish reaches an astonishing market value of $1 billion, with a reward pool growing to $100 million.
This doesn’t mean the reward will only be given once cancer is completely cured. Any progress toward this objective can be rewarded, as long as the pool has shares.
Now, imagine a young researcher contributes a paper advancing the solution to this problem. The wish creator, IARC, decides to reward this submission with $1 million.
Why it matters
Here are two interesting points:
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The organization receives funding without any “donor”—it’s like making a wish to the sky. The funds come entirely from the market. As long as the reward pool isn’t overused, the market remains stable and unaffected.
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Even more fascinating, when the market value of a wish reaches $1 billion, there’s no physical entity behind it—it’s purely a concept. Yet this intangible concept drives real societal progress.
As I mentioned earlier, this represents a completely new form of democracy. Markets are fundamentally shaped by individuals like you and me. When an issue reaches this level of market value, it’s clear that people genuinely care about it.
4. Where Wishpool Comes From
In 2023, we launched Bodhi, a platform for trading content. It quickly became a hit in the Chinese crypto community, with over 10K assets created in two days. However, it failed to reach the English audience. The unexpected hype led to technical issues during peak trading periods. Some users lost money due to lagging and page bugs.
I felt responsible and decided to cover the losses with my own funds. Exhausted after two days without sleep, I posted a bounty on Bodhi: anyone who could write a script to calculate and distribute refunds would receive 5 shares.
To my surprise, the post itself sparked a frenzy. The share price shot up from $0.1 to $1k within 30 minutes. By the next morning, three submissions had solved the problem, and I distributed $6k worth of shares to them. I called it “Wish Zero.”
That moment felt like magic: I made a wish, and the market fulfilled it.
Now, we’ve turned this process into a permissionless protocol, expanding it with more wish types for everyone to use.
5. How the Launch is Progressing
To launch Wishpool, I used a radical approach: I let it launch itself.
I created the Genesis Wish, asking vitalik.eth to do a simple action: press the fulfill button.
Until this wish is fulfilled, the app remains locked—no one can create or explore other wishes.
This approach felt like a self-referential performance art: if it’s fulfilled, it proves the system works and deserves to launch. If not, it isn’t ready.
I avoided explaining the product, hoping people would discover its revolutionary nature on their own.
But so far, most people think it’s just another trading platform. Literally no one understand it. Even crypto OGs don’t really get it.
That’s why I wrote this thread—to explain everything to you, to whoever is reading this.
6. Conclusion
In the end, all I want to say is:
Anything shared in your mind and others’ is a meme.
A shared future is a meme.
Crypto offers a way for this future to be realized—something once unimaginable.
This isn’t a Meme-the-pic revolution.
It’s a Meme-the-shared-ideas revolution.
Every great revolution starts with individuals.
Here’s what you can do:
- Like and repost this thread.
- Try the app: wishpool.wtf and check out the Genesis Wish.
- Read my earlier essay (in 2023): About Bodhi. It might be the first article discussing solving the public goods funding problem with memes and ponzi (aka memecoins).