I was initially skeptical about it needing a cryptocurrency but the idea of needing to stake predictions to prevent anonymous data scientists from submitting thousands of predictions to game the tournament is really interesting.

I also really like the idea of the fund crowdsourcing many predictions with the obvious but unsaid endgame being the meta-model much like how the random forest algorithm ensambles many weak predictors into a strong predictor that's far more accurate than any single weak predictor.

Interested to see where this is in a couple of years...