Picture this

Who it is for

A founder needs to know if a feature will flop. She posts it with 200 USDC, experts answer and rate each other, and payouts flow to those whose reasoning shaped the final answer.

Two ways to own it

What you get

Base$299

$75 deposit to reserve

Question bounties, peer rating, influence scoring, USDC escrow and payouts

You choose: chain
You choose: name and logo
You choose: accent color
You choose: fee percent

Customfrom $2,500

Built around you

Reshape it entirely: new features, your flows, your brand end to end, integrations you need. We scope it with you.

Everything in Base
Custom features and design
Priority build

Why it is new

What exists today, and what this does differently

What is new

No product found that pays contributors by their measured influence on a consensus answer.

Closest things out there

Bountycaster, Gitcoin and Railway bounties pay an accepted answer or approved work; none found splitting a bounty by each answer's influence on the final consensus.

Checked with web searches in October 2026. A search is not proof that nothing similar exists, and the market moves fast, so we recheck before every build.

What it unlocks

The human in it

Monetizes judgment in a group setting.

The Regatta Board

Races it can enter

hackathon · Colosseum · rolling

Colosseum Eternal

On-demand, ongoing

Official page ↗

Existing projects allowed

Their rule on existing code: Designed for teams already building; existing projects allowed

accelerator · Alliance · rolling

Alliance DAO accelerator

rolling cohorts

Official page ↗

Existing projects OK

Their rule on existing code: Existing projects OK

What you own

The whole app, not a starter kit.

The complete Ask The Room app: anyone posts one hard question with a USDC bounty, experts answer and rate each other, and the bounty pays out by how much each answer moved the decision, with a paywall and room agent built in.

Base price · $299

The user app, complete

Every buyer gets the same finished app. Basic branding and copy changes come through a quick form.

Three step onboardingHome

Shown once: one hard question, the room answers, pay who moved it.

Room status and next actionHome

The question, bounty, answers in, current flop risk and one next step.

Ask flowAsk

Question, resolve rule, bounty and window, with the room fee shown before escrow.

Private roomsAsk

Only invited experts see the room. Gated behind Team.

Expert benchAsk

Invite trusted experts for a first look. Gated behind Team.

Live room with scaleRoom

Hidden until posted answers, peer ratings, the brass scale and threads by influence.

Pick the most useful answerRoom

The asker's pick counts extra in the final weighting.

Rating ring catchRoom

Sock puppet wallets that rate each other are cut and not paid.

Influence payouts and receiptPayouts

One batched payout by leave one out influence with a floor, plus escrow receipt.

Expert share cardsPayouts

Cards for the people who moved the room.

Calibration ranksPayouts

Resolve day scoring for every expert. Gated behind Team.

Plans and USDC checkoutMe

Asker, Team and Fund tiers through the shared USDC checkout.

Open the full app demo

Add-on

Owner console

Your admin side: revenue, paywall editor, users, rules and the agent log.

Revenue and paywall editorRevenue

Room fees, MRR, incoming USDC, payment methods, tiers, fee and gates.

Room rulesRules

Floor share, minimum rating, network, ring check and low effort screen.

Agent log with failuresAgent

Scoring and ring failures and how they were fixed, plus running costs.

Roadmap build requestsRoadmap

v2 and v3 scopes with add-on prices.

Top-up

Growth and referrals

Referral and growth mechanics, switched on when you are ready to grow.

Topic bench loop and referralsGrowth

Recruit a topic bench, share cards, ranks and repeat askers.

The money path, built in

How it earns for you

A fee on public room bounties, plus Team and Fund subscriptions in USDC for private rooms and expert benches.

AskerFreePublic rooms, any bounty, escrow and payouts, a 5% room fee

Team$99 a monthPrivate rooms, your own expert bench, calibration ranks, no room fee up to $2,000

Fund$400 a monthEverything in Team, unlimited private rooms, research export, API

Owner sets the room fee on public rooms, 5% by default.

Prices are yours to set. Illustrative, not a promise of income.

Growth loops, built in

How it spreads

Share cards for experts who moved a room
Calibration ranks that attract askers
Askers who come back with bigger questions
Published research from resolved rooms

Roadmap · build the next phase with us

Where it goes next

v1 included

The full room

Escrow with batched payout
Ask flow with resolve rule
Peer rating and leave one out scoring
Ring check and effort screen
Calibration and paywall

Included

Private rooms for DAOs

Token gated rooms
Proposal research template
Governance links
Discord digest

Add-on from $700

Expert network

Calibration leaderboard
Expert profiles
Book an expert
Research library

Add-on from $1,500

For investors and grant reviewers

The pitch, ready

Rent the best thinking in the room for one hard question, and pay only for judgment that moved the answer.

Problem: Founders and DAOs pay for advice by the hour or by volume, not by whether it changed the decision.

Solution: A USDC bounty in escrow, hidden answers, peer ratings and leave one out influence scoring, with ring detection and calibration.

Why now: Cheap escrow on L2s and cheap screening models make small expert rooms practical.

Market: Founders, startup teams, DAOs and funds, from public rooms to $400 a month private rooms.

The ask: Run 10 rooms for founders you know, then sell Team plans.

Funding is never guaranteed. Check each program's rules.

For hackathons and demo days

Your 2 minute demo

Home: Priya's question about killing the free plan.
Ask: set the resolve rule and a 200 USDC bounty, open the room.
Room: answers arrive and the scale tips; pick Wanjiru as most useful.
Ask again with a rating ring; watch it get caught.
Payouts: one batched payout by influence; calibration ranks gated behind Team.
Owner Agent: the early bias fix and ring check.
Owner Revenue: change the room fee and Team price.
Owner Growth: recruit a pricing bench.

Many hackathons require code written at the event. See the Regatta Boardfor each race's rule.

Make it entirely yours

Custom scoring, token gated rooms, new chains and branded research pages, scoped on a call from $1,000.

Custom from $2,500

BLUEPRINT

Why it matters and how it really works

The need

Founders and small teams face hard calls with no good way to buy judgment. Friends give free opinions, consultants are expensive, and bounty platforms reward the first or the accepted answer, not the reasoning that actually changed the decision. Experts who think carefully rarely get paid for one good paragraph.

What exists and what is new

Closest existing: Bountycaster, Gitcoin and Railway bounties pay for an accepted answer or approved work, and prediction markets pay for being right on a resolvable event. We did not find a product that splits one bounty by how much each answer moved a weighted consensus. Peer prediction and influence scoring are known research ideas; the new part is packaging them as a simple paid room with USDC escrow. Not a new science.

The data it runs on

The question and its resolution rule, the written answers with a percentage, peer ratings, the asker's one boost, wallet history of each participant, and calibration scores from earlier rooms. Answers and ratings stay off chain; only escrow, payouts and a hash of the score table are on chain.

1.The mission

Pay people for judgment that actually moves a decision, and let anyone with a hard question rent the best thinking in the room for the price of a dinner.

2.Why people can't resist it

Being the one who changed it Seeing your paragraph move the room from 64% to 52% is a rare, screenshot worthy kind of credit.

Resolve day Weeks later the question resolves and everyone learns who was right. People return just to see their score.

The Sunday Room A weekly set of paid questions in your topics, with the bounty up front, makes it a ritual instead of a chore.

3.How it works for real

Wallets: Embedded wallets via Privy or a smart wallet, on Base, Arbitrum or Solana, with sponsored gas. Askers can fund by card through an onramp.

Escrow: A room contract holds the bounty, the open window and the fee percent. At close it pays out from a posted score table and keeps a hash of it so anyone can recompute.

Scoring: Consensus is a rating weighted average of answers. Each answer's influence is leave one out: how far the final number moves without it. A floor share pays every answer rated 2.5 or higher.

Room agent: A Flash or mini class model via OpenRouter screens low effort answers, and a stronger model tier summarises the room for the asker. A graph check on ratings and wallet funding catches reciprocal rating rings.

Identity and calibration: Optional proof of personhood or reputation attestations (EAS) reduce sock puppets. Calibration from resolved rooms sets starting weight in the next.

Notifications: Push and email for new rooms in your topics, close, payout and resolve day.

4.Cost per use and pricing

Per room of about 8 answers: screening with a Flash class model costs well under $0.01, and a summary with a stronger model roughly $0.01 to $0.05. Escrow deposit plus one batched payout on Base is typically a few cents or less. Example month: 400 rooms cost roughly $20 to $40 to run, while a 5% room fee on 400 bounties of 200 USDC would be 4,000 USDC in fees.

Room fee 5% of each bounty

Taken at close. Refunds on rooms with no qualifying answers carry no fee.

Private rooms $29 per month

Invite only rooms, NDA prompts, hidden questions, and direct invites to top calibrated experts.

Team $199 per month

Shared bounty budget, decision archive with resolutions, and calibration reports across the team's questions.

5.Growth loop

Every resolved room produces share cards for the experts who moved it, which recruit new experts. Strong calibration ranks pull in askers who want those people. Askers who got a useful answer post the next hard question, often with a bigger bounty.

6.Risks and guardrails

Sybil and collusion: Rings of fake accounts can rate each other up. Graph checks, wallet funding analysis and personhood attestations reduce it, but never fully remove it.

Gambling and securities rules: Paying for answers on future outcomes can resemble betting in some places. Pay for reasoning and influence, not for the outcome, avoid financial asset questions, and get legal advice per region.

Bad advice: A confident room can still be wrong. Show uncertainty, say clearly it is not professional advice, and keep regulated topics out.

Confidentiality: Askers reveal internal numbers. Offer private rooms and keep question text off chain.

Scoring disputes: People will contest influence math. Publish the formula and the hashed score table so any payout can be recomputed.

7.Build order

Room escrow contract with open, close and batched payout on Base testnet
Ask flow: question, resolve rule, bounty, window, fee
Answer flow with percentage and reasoning, hidden until posted
Peer rating and leave one out scoring with a floor share
Rating ring check and low effort screen
Resolve day and calibration scores
Share cards and the Sunday Room digest

8.Where this is going

Now
Founders pay small rooms of practitioners for hard product and pricing calls, and the people who moved the answer get paid.
Next
Calibration scores follow experts from room to room, so being right compounds into better invites and more weight.
Later
Communities, city councils and nonprofits run rooms on local questions, with bounties pooled from members.
The world
Good judgment becomes a paid, portable skill anyone can build, and decisions everywhere get to draw on the best thinking, not the loudest.

Costs and tools are estimates at the time of writing. General information only, not legal or financial advice.

OWNER PLAYBOOK

Own it, then chart your voyage

Nine routes from one vessel. Tap a port to open its chart.

Why own Ask The Room

Ask The Room lets a founder post a hard question with a USDC bounty and pays the experts whose reasoning actually moved the final answer. On someone else's platform, the experts you attract, the question archive and the fee all belong to them. Own it and your expert network, your brand and every bounty fee stay with you, onchain and portable.

What’s stopping you?

“I can't code.”

You do not need to. It ships with question bounties, peer rating, influence scoring and USDC escrow and payouts. You choose the chain, name, logo and color.

“What if nobody posts a question?”

That is the real risk, so do not wait for strangers. Post the first three questions yourself with small bounties, or ask three founders you know to post theirs. A room with three good answered questions sells itself.

“Can people game the influence scoring?”

Some will try, through rating rings or copying top answers. Keep early rooms invite only, watch for accounts that only rate each other, and make the scoring rules public. Be honest that no scoring is perfect.

“Is holding bounties in escrow legal where I live?”

The contract holds the bounty and pays out by rule; you are not banking anyone. Paying people for answers can still have tax or reporting angles in some countries, so check local rules before you run large rooms, and do not call bounties investments.

“Is it really mine?”

Yes. It deploys from your wallet, under your domain. The fee setting, the expert list and the question archive belong to your instance.

The million-dollar ladder

You take a fee on each bounty, sell monthly plans to teams that post questions often, and charge communities for a private branded room. The ladder below is a target, not a promise.

$200

$3,960

$24,000

$85,000

First 10 questions from founders you know

10 questions

$20 fee each

Paid team plans for startups

40 teams

$99 per month

Private rooms for DAOs and funds

60 rooms