World Certainty Index — a real-time measure of how predictable each country's near-term future is, according to people betting real money.
It reads live prediction-market prices and turns them into a single 0–100 score per country: high when outcomes are settled, low when they're genuinely up for grabs.
What it measures
Every prediction market is a question with money on it — “Will there be a ceasefire by June?”, “Who wins the next election?” The price is the crowd's live probability. Near 0% or 100%, the outcome is settled. Near 50/50, it's contested.
WCI reads that signal across every market tied to a country and rolls it into one score, recomputed about every 90 seconds. It splits into three sub-indices — Political, Economic, and Security — so you can see which kind of future is uncertain, not just that it is.
How it's built
Ingest. Every active market from Polymarket, grouped by its native country tags — attribution comes from Polymarket's own data, never a language model guessing from titles.
Score. Three factors multiplied together: price certainty (how far from a coin-flip), spread confidence (how tight the bid-ask is), and stability (the inverse of recent volatility). Each market is weighted by its trading volume.
De-duplicate. Markets describing the same event are collapsed so nothing is double-counted. A ladder of deadlines becomes one signal; a multi-candidate race is scored by how concentrated the field is.
Aggregate. Markets roll into the three sub-indices, then into a country score, then into the global index — where countries are weighted by a blend of trading volume and GDP, so a thin market can't swing the world.
Confidence. A country needs ≥ 20 markets to be high confidence, ≥ 5 for medium. Below that it's low coverage — tracked and visible, but greyed out, because a score off one or two markets is noise.
What it doesn't measure
Being straight about this matters more than a marketing line. WCI measures how confidently the market can call each question — which is not the same as how safe or stable a country is.
A country at war can rack up confident “this catastrophe won't happen” markets priced at 2%, which read as certain. Coverage is uneven — the score is far more reliable where markets are deep. And it's not yet validated against historical outcomes; that work is the next milestone.
Why prediction markets
The best-known uncertainty measures count words in news articles or survey experts, and update monthly or yearly. By the time they publish, the uncertainty they describe has often already resolved.
When someone risks real capital on an outcome, they fold private information, public knowledge, and forward-looking expectation into a single price — and it updates the instant new information arrives. WCI is what you get when you read that signal continuously across every country at once.