BantabaMarkets Documentation

In The Gambia and across much of West Africa, there is already a tradition for this. Long before anyone called it a “prediction market,” people gathered under a bantaba, the shaded meeting place at the centre of a village, to argue about what was going to happen next. Would the rains come early. Who would win the match on Sunday. What the harvest would look like this year. Elders weighed in, opinions were tested against each other in public, and the community formed its collective read on an uncertain future out loud, together.

BantabaMarkets is that same idea, built as a platform. You put real money behind what you believe will happen in a real, verifiable event: a football match, an election result, an inflation print, a piece of regional culture news. Everyone who backed the outcome that actually happens shares the pool of money that was staked, once a small commission is taken out. Everyone who backed the outcome that didn't happen loses their stake. There is no house taking the other side of your bet, and no bookmaker setting the odds ahead of time. The odds come entirely from how the community stakes.

This matters because it changes what kind of platform BantabaMarkets is, and what kind it deliberately isn't. It is not a trading exchange. You will not find an order book here, or the ability to buy a position and sell it back a few minutes later for a profit if the price moves in your favor. There is no continuous price you can trade in and out of, no market makers, and no fee structure built around trading volume. When you stake, that stake is locked until the real world tells us who was right. That single decision, made early and held to consistently, shapes almost everything else described on this page.

You don't need an account to look around. Open any market from the homepage or a category page and you can read the question, the resolution criteria, the current pool split between outcomes, and the full discussion underneath it, all without signing up. You can even pick an outcome and type in an amount to see what it would pay out. The only moment BantabaMarkets asks you to create an account is when you actually try to confirm a stake, and at that point whatever you had already filled in is still sitting there waiting for you once you're signed in.

Creating an account takes an email address and a password. There is no card required and nothing charged automatically. Once you're in, the first thing worth doing is making a deposit through the Wallet page, since every stake comes out of your available balance. Deposits and withdrawals run through mobile money, the same rails already used for everyday payments across the region, so funding your account should feel familiar rather than like adapting to a foreign payment system.

From there, browsing is the best way to get a feel for it. Look at a market with a question you actually have an opinion on, read how it will be resolved and against which source, and watch how the split between outcomes shifts as more people stake.

Every market on BantabaMarkets goes through the same four stages, and understanding them is really the whole platform.

Not every market reaches settlement the way it was expected to. If a market never reaches the minimum pool size it needed to be worth resolving, or is cancelled for any other reason, every stake placed on it is refunded in full and no commission is ever taken. Cancellation exists to protect you, not the platform.

Markets are organized into five broad hubs, and each one carries its own set of sub-topics underneath it, so you can go as specific as you like.

A single is the simplest kind of stake: you back one outcome in one market, and it settles on its own. Most stakes on BantabaMarkets are singles.

A combo lets you link outcomes from several different markets into a single slip. You might, for example, combine a prediction about a football result with a prediction about an upcoming election into one combo. The appeal is that the payout multipliers from each leg compound together, so a combo can pay out considerably more than any one of its legs would on its own. The tradeoff is symmetric: a combo only pays out if every single leg in it wins. Get four legs right and one wrong, and the whole combo loses, the same as any leg on its own would have.

Singles and combos are priced differently, and it's worth understanding why. A single stake is pari-mutuel: your payout depends on the shape of the pool at the moment the market closes, so it keeps moving right up until then. A combo leg, by contrast, is priced at the odds available the instant you build the slip, and those odds are locked in immediately, they don't move again regardless of what the pool does afterward. That's deliberate: it's the only way we can show you a real potential payout for a combo before you commit to it, since a true pari-mutuel combo multiplier wouldn't be knowable until every market in it has actually settled, which could be days or weeks apart. One consequence worth knowing: because of this, the same outcome can end up paying a slightly different effective rate in a combo leg than it would as a single placed at another time — that's not a bug, it's the two pricing models working as designed.

Both singles and combos follow the same core rule that runs through everything on this platform. Once a stake is placed, it is locked until the market, or every market in a combo, has actually resolved.

BantabaMarkets keeps its fees to three, all of them visible up front, and none of them tied to trading activity, because there is no trading to tax.

That is the entire list. There is no fee for staking, no fee for browsing, no fee for building a combo, and nothing hidden in the odds themselves.

Every account gets its own referral link automatically, available on the Refer & Earn page. Share it, and when someone joins through it, you have referred them. But the reward itself is tied to something more meaningful than a signup.

When the person you referred makes their first deposit, real money entering the platform for the first time through your link, you earn 10% of that deposit amount, credited straight to your wallet the moment the deposit clears, up to a cap of 10 GMD per referral. If they deposit 50 GMD or less as their first deposit, you receive 10% of it; if they deposit more than that, the reward still caps at 10 GMD — depositing 500 GMD or 1,000,000 GMD as a first deposit earns you the same 10 GMD. There is no cap on how many people you can refer, so your total earnings across all referrals is unlimited even though each individual reward is capped.

Signing up through your link on its own doesn't earn you anything, and that is deliberate. Tying the reward to a real first deposit rather than a bare signup means the reward reflects someone genuinely joining the platform, not just clicking a link. Until your referral deposits, your referrals page will show them as pending. The moment they do, it updates to show exactly what you earned.

Deposits and withdrawals on BantabaMarkets run through mobile money, the payment method most people across The Gambia and Senegal already use for everyday transfers, rather than requiring a bank card or an international payment method. You initiate a deposit from the Wallet page, complete it through your mobile money provider, and the funds land in your available balance once the payment is confirmed.

Withdrawals work in the other direction and are debited from your balance the moment you request them, so the funds can't be spent twice while the transfer is being processed. In the rare case that a transfer fails on the processor's side after your balance has already been debited, the full amount is returned to your wallet automatically. You should never need to chase a failed withdrawal manually.

Every market has its own discussion space underneath it, a running conversation where you can share why you staked the way you did, argue the other side, or just follow along. You can bring another user directly into the conversation by typing @ followed by their username. Start typing after the @ and a list of matching usernames appears so you can pick the right person without guessing the exact spelling.

Keeping that space usable for everyone matters as much as the markets themselves. A comment that trips an automated content filter, or that another user reports, is never deleted automatically. Instead it is queued for a human moderator to review, so a false positive never silently erases something you wrote in good faith. Reporting a comment takes one click and is available to any signed-in user directly from the comment.

The leaderboard ranks the community two ways: by settlement accuracy, meaning your win rate across every stake you've had actually settle, and by total volume staked over time. Accuracy ranking requires a minimum number of settled stakes before you qualify, specifically so that one lucky single stake can't put a brand-new account at the top of the board ahead of people with a genuine track record.

What shows up next to your name depends on whether you've set a username in Settings. If you have, that username is what the leaderboard, and everywhere else your name appears publicly, shows. If you haven't, your full name appears masked, so something like “Amie Bojang” shows as “Amie B.”

BantabaMarkets is restricted to users 18 years of age or older, no exceptions. Staking real money should stay something you do deliberately and within your means, and the platform is built with that expectation from the ground up, not as an afterthought.

If your use of BantabaMarkets ever starts to feel like more than entertainment, you can ask to have your account suspended or self-excluded at any time. Details on how to do that, along with our current regulatory status and what BantabaMarkets is and is not permitted to offer today, are covered fully in our Regulatory Disclosure. Our Terms of Service cover the rest of the legal detail, including how to raise a dispute over how a market was resolved if you ever believe it was settled incorrectly.