Manifund Q1 Retro: Learnings from impact certs
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Austin Chen
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Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: LessWrong
Relevant to those interested in alternative funding mechanisms for AI safety and EA projects; provides practical lessons from a real-world impact certificate experiment rather than purely theoretical discussion.
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Summary
A retrospective from Manifund on their Q1 experience running impact certificate markets, examining what worked and what didn't in using prediction-market-style mechanisms to fund and evaluate EA/AI safety projects. The post shares lessons learned about donor behavior, project selection, and the practical challenges of implementing impact certs at scale.
Key Points
- •Impact certificates attempt to create a market mechanism where funders can retroactively buy 'shares' in successful projects, incentivizing early-stage funding.
- •Manifund observed challenges around liquidity, price discovery, and donor motivation that complicate theoretical models of impact cert markets.
- •Retroactive funding mechanisms may work better for some project types than others, particularly those with clearer, measurable outcomes.
- •Lessons from Q1 informed structural changes to how Manifund operates its funding rounds and evaluates project impact.
- •The experiment provides empirical data on whether impact cert markets can serve as a scalable alternative to traditional grant-making in EA-adjacent spaces.
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# Manifund Q1 Retro: Learnings from impact certs
By Austin Chen
Published: 2024-05-01
Manifund is a philanthropic startup that runs a website and programs to fund awesome projects. From January to now, we wrapped up 3 different programs for impact certificates (aka venture-style funding for charity projects): ACX Grants, Manifold Community Fund, and the Chinatalk essay competition.
Overall, we’ve learned a lot and are happy with the projects we’ve funded, but are less excited by impact certs than before — it’s been hard to get investor interest, and we still haven’t found a use case where certs led to better funding decisions. For the next quarter, we’re trying out a bunch of things (including Manifest, regranting, and prize challenges) while looking to get product-market fit.
What we’ve been working on in Q1
================================
ACX Grants 2024
---------------
Manifund hosted the 2024 round of ACX Grants, which included both direct funding to some projects and an impact market for any project that opted-in and did not receive direct funding. ACX directly funded 33 projects for a total of $1.35mm; on the impact market, investors funded 12 projects to their minimum bars, for ~$50k total at a combined valuation of ~$200k.
### Background
[Astral Codex Ten](https://www.astralcodexten.com/) (ACX) is a blog by Scott Alexander on topics like reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics, and politics. [ACX Grants](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024) (ACXG) is a program in which Scott helps fund charitable and scientific projects — see the 2022 round [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results) and his retrospective on ACX Grants 2022 [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-a-microgrants).
In this round (ACX Grants 2024), some of the applications were [directly funded](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024) by Scott; the rest were given the option to participate in an impact market, an alternative to grants or donations as a way to fund charitable projects. Manifund transferred funds from donors to grantees; hosted project proposals on our website; and ran the impact marketplace.
### ACXG Direct Funding
Scott evaluated all of the applications along with his team of judges, then directed a total of $1.35M to 33 projects. You can see the results on [ACX](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024) or on the [“Grants” tab](https://manifund.org/causes/acx-grants-2024?tab=grants) of Manifund’s ACXG 2024 page. Example grants:
[Open source predictors for polygenic screening](https://manifund.org/projects/create-open-sour), by Gene Smith
[Building anti-mosquito drones](https://manifund.org/projects/build-anti-mosqu), by Alex Toussaint
[Solving Far-UVC ozone generation](https://manifund.org/projects/validate-a-solut), by Jacob Swett
This was relatively straightforward to run, as making direct grants is similar to what we di
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