At Solana Breakpoint in Abu Dhabi, innovation across blockchain and digital finance was on full display, including new approaches to prediction markets and information economies. One of the standout conversations featured Isaac Simons, co founder of CHOMP, who shared his unconventional path from neuroscience and economics into building crypto powered consensus platforms.
Simons’ background sets him apart from many founders in the digital asset space. With formal training in neuroscience and psychobiology, he developed an early fascination with understanding human behavior through biological and neurological frameworks. This interest later evolved into economics, where he explored how large scale human behavior could be measured and modeled statistically. After leaving an economics PhD program in late 2021, Simons made a decisive shift into cryptocurrency, an industry he had already been involved with since 2015.
His early crypto work focused on mechanism design and consulting across multiple blockchain projects. Over time, his objective became more defined. Simons wanted to use crypto infrastructure to build economic systems from the ground up that were accessible to everyday users rather than limited to governments, institutions, or elites.
That vision materialized in CHOMP, a platform designed as a consensus protocol for subjective information. While CHOMP resembles a prediction market, Simons describes it as something broader. The platform allows users to engage with questions ranging from casual personal opinions to socially meaningful topics, creating a marketplace for sentiment, belief, and collective judgment.
Traditional prediction markets often struggle with manipulation or strategic dishonesty, especially when participants try to guess the majority opinion rather than express their own. CHOMP approaches this challenge differently. Its incentive structure is designed to reward honest participation and accurate predictions of consensus, encouraging users to reveal what they truly believe rather than what they think others want to hear.
In standard voting systems, participants often distort responses to align with perceived popular outcomes. CHOMP reverses that incentive. Users benefit from expressing authentic opinions while also predicting how others will respond. This structure improves information quality and fosters a more transparent and reliable signal of real sentiment.
The platform’s design emphasizes accessibility and engagement. Users earn rewards based on prediction accuracy while maintaining integrity in expressing personal viewpoints. This balance allows CHOMP to generate meaningful data while remaining intuitive and enjoyable. Simons’ long term goal is to bridge the divide between crypto native users and broader Web2 audiences.
CHOMP’s initial version focused on crypto users, incorporating wallet integrations and on chain participation. The next phase expands that vision. The team is developing an iOS application aimed at mainstream audiences who naturally engage with interactive content. Simons pointed to communities like reality television viewers who enjoy social prediction, narratives, and outcomes as a natural fit for the platform.
By gamifying prediction markets and removing technical friction, CHOMP aims to transform information sharing into a social experience. This shift reflects broader trends across blockchain and decentralized finance, where infrastructure increasingly supports everything from payments to forecasting and behavioral analysis.
As CHOMP continues to evolve, it highlights a growing movement within crypto toward democratizing information and participation. By combining social dynamics with blockchain incentives, the platform offers a new way to surface collective insight at scale. This model aligns closely with themes of sustainability, impact driven investing, and user owned digital economies.
Isaac Simons represents a new generation of founders shaping crypto beyond speculation. Through CHOMP, he is helping redefine how subjective information is collected, valued, and shared. As decentralized systems mature, platforms that prioritize honest engagement and broad accessibility may play a central role in the future of digital economies.