What it was
Scenara was a real-time prediction-market simulation: users took positions on real-world outcomes — crypto price targets, Brazilian politics, global sports, macro, live news — with a simulated wallet and zero real money. Markets were auto-generated hourly from live price and news data; open probabilities drifted on a five-minute random walk so charts stayed alive; a settlement engine resolved markets, paid winners by their entry probability, and wrote every balance change to an immutable audit ledger. Performance meant PnL, a Brier-score accuracy grade (0-100), win streaks, XP and levels, and a global leaderboard, with a follow/feed social graph and market comment threads on top. It was built Brazil-first, for people who want the prediction-market game with zero real money on the line — and as the compliance-shaped foundation for a real-money version later: KYC flow, account verification architecture, and fintech-style user management were in place pre-release. It never launched publicly, but the full stack ran in production for months: FastAPI/SQLAlchemy API, Expo/React Native app, web on Vercel, an admin analytics dashboard, a backtesting engine, bilingual content, push notifications. The archived database holds 84,130 probability-history snapshots across 11,680 scenarios and 5,798 auto-generated events — the engine generating, drifting and resolving markets unattended. Built solo, October 2025 to April 2026.
Regulatory, plainly. Prediction markets remain tightly regulated in the markets Scenara targeted, and with little sign of that easing in the near term, I chose to stop rather than keep building toward a launch that could not happen. The product itself worked: markets auto-generated hourly, probabilities updated every five minutes, and the settlement engine resolved and paid out on its own for months. It never launched publicly — the wind-down was a decision about the market, not the software. It is still a field I find genuinely interesting, and one I expect to come back to when the regulatory picture opens up.
Never launched publicly, so there was no churn to report — the only accounts in the database are my own test accounts. No growth experiments were run; the wind-down decision came before marketing did.
Validate the regulatory path as early and as hard as you validate the product. Scenara worked end to end — a working product is not a launchable one if regulation blocks the market you built it for. Stopping early was cheaper than launching into a wall.
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The founder
Founder @ Curio — live on the App Store | Built Scenara | Software Engineer (Python, React Native, FastAPI) | B.S. Computer Engineering @ CSUEB, May 2027
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