Our Story

Neostake started with a very simple problem.

Someone would say they knew who was going to win. Someone else was certain an event would never happen. Someone had a strong opinion about an election, a football match, or whatever people happened to be arguing about that week.

We had these conversations all the time. Between lectures, over lunch, at parties, and in group chats.

And once the outcome was known, everyone somehow remembered being right.

We thought there should be a better way.

So the three of us built Neostake (Paul Gasselseder, Philipp Grömer, and Moritz Strachon).

The idea was simple: create a prediction, let others take a side, and come back later to see who actually called it.

No money. No financial incentive.

Just opinions, competition, and the satisfaction of being able to say: I told you so.

What began as a small project between three students quickly became much more than that.

People started creating markets about football matches, elections, university events, campus life, and questions we never would have thought of ourselves. That was exactly what we wanted Neostake to be: a platform shaped by the curiosity of the people using it.

But allowing anyone to create a market came with a difficult problem.

Who decides what actually happened?

For Neostake to work, resolving a market could not depend on the person who created it, the people participating in it, or us manually deciding who was right.

So we built our own oracle system.

It was designed to independently resolve outcomes across fundamentally different types of events, from structured sports results and political races to much less standardized real world events.

It became one of the hardest parts of building Neostake, and one of the parts we cared about most.

During the entire time Neostake was live, not a single market was resolved incorrectly.

That mattered to us because underneath the playful idea of predicting things with friends, Neostake only worked if people could trust the result.

Over time, the project became an exercise in much more than building software.

We learned what happens when an idea leaves a whiteboard and meets real users. We learned that the features you are most excited about are not always the ones people care about. We learned how much thought can hide behind a product that is supposed to feel simple. And we learned that building something people actually use forces you to make decisions very differently from building something only for yourself.

Most importantly, Neostake stopped being just ours.

It was shaped by the people who tested early versions, created markets, broke things, gave feedback, shared the platform, challenged our assumptions, and kept coming back.

We are incredibly grateful to CDTM, CAMPUS-Tüten, Marshall, and the TUM Blockchain Club for supporting us along the way, whether by opening doors, giving us feedback, or simply believing that the idea was worth exploring.

And thank you to everyone who used Neostake.

Every prediction made the platform a little more alive. Every weirdly specific market made it a little more fun. Every disagreement, every correct call, and every confidently wrong prediction became part of the project.

Now, Neostake is coming to an end.

It is strange to close something that occupied such a large part of our time at university.

We are proud of what we built.

But more than anything, we are grateful that we decided to build it at all.

Because Neostake started with a question we kept asking each other:

Who do you think is going to be right?

For a while, we built a place where you could actually find out.