CARMA

Inspiration

Early founders face a fundamental problem: validation. We’ve seen friends, colleagues, and even ourselves spend months building something only to realize the market didn’t want it. Validation is slow, subjective, and usually comes too late.

We asked a simple question: What if founders could get real market signals before wasting time and money? That became the inspiration behind CARMA — a prediction market that provides early validation by giving real market sentiment from a community that believes in your vision.

What it does

CARMA is a prediction platform for pre-crowdfunding projects. It connects two groups:

• Founders, who post milestones with deadlines.
• Predictors, who bet YES or NO using internal credits on whether the milestone will be met. Correct predictions earn rewards, while incorrect ones lose their stake. This creates:
• A market-driven confidence score
• An AI-generated Success Score that analyzes both the project and the prediction trends Founders also offer early supporter perks (access, beta roles, lifetime deals, etc.) to attract early believers.

How we built it

We built CARMA using:

• Next.js for the frontend
• Supabase for auth, profiles, and project data
• Lovable AI for rapid component generation and UI iteration
• A custom prediction engine that simulates an AMM-like model using internal credits
• AI-driven scoring using an embedded model to generate project Confidence Scores
• A tiered project system with media validation and milestone verification logic All components were designed to be easily portable to a future on-chain architecture.

Challenges we ran into

• Milestone verification: We needed every milestone to be fully quantifiable so it could be objectively judged, but also engaging enough that people would actually want to bet on it.
• Time constraints
• Limited credits

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a fully working end-to-end prediction workflow

What we learned

We learned that ideas can come from anywhere and at any moment. We originally joined this hackathon just for fun, but the concept for CARMA grew so quickly and felt so real that now we’re genuinely committed to building it further.

What's next for CARMA

• Make it On-chain

Built With

• bolt.new
• lovable