neuportal/neuportal-sealed-crypto-forecasts

NeuPortal Sealed Crypto Forecasts

Interval forecasts for eight crypto pairs, each hashed with SHA-256 and anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps before publication, scored afterwards against Binance closes.

The forecasts are not the interesting part. Anyone can produce forecasts. The interesting part is that every row carries a hash that existed before the outcome did, so a reader can check that the numbers were not selected after the fact - and that the misses are in the file, including a calibration failure large enough that we would rather it were not.

What is in here

Two files.

neuportal-sealed-forecasts.csv - 144 forecasts, 56 resolved, sealed between 2026-07-20 and 2026-07-29. Unresolved rows are deliberately included: a file in which every forecast has an outcome is the shape a curated record takes.

Figures below are the state at 2026-07-29. They move as forecasts resolve, and they will not match an older copy of this card. The live scoreboard at https://neuportal.ai/experiment is the current one; when the two disagree, the scoreboard is right and this card is stale.

column	meaning
symbol	Binance pair (BTC, ETH, SOL, BNB, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK against USDT)
horizon	24h, 7d or 30d
sealed_at	UTC timestamp at which the forecast was hashed, before publication
resolves_at	UTC timestamp the forecast resolves against
spot	price at sealing
median	central estimate
core_lo, core_hi	stated 50% interval
wide_lo, wide_hi	stated 80% interval
stance	LONG / SHORT / NEUTRAL momentum lean at sealing
sha256	hash of the sealed forecast object
method	unconditional, conditional (volatility-regime matched), or unattested - see below. Present so the claim about which rows predate the calibration fix can be checked rather than believed
status	final (resolved) or upcoming
outcome	realised price at resolves_at, empty if unresolved
in_core, in_wide	1 if the outcome fell inside that interval
err_pct	signed percentage error of the median

The headline result, which is a failure

Coverage on the resolved forecasts:

horizon	n	core (target 50%)	wide (target 80%)
24h	44	81.8% (36 of 44)	97.7% (43 of 44)
7d	12	91.7% (11 of 12)	100% (12 of 12)
30d	0	-	-
all horizons	56	83.9% (47 of 56)	98.2% (55 of 56)

The all-horizons row is the figure shown on the public scoreboard, and the per-horizon rows are what it decomposes into. Both are given because quoting whichever is worse-looking on a given day, without the other, is a way of telling the truth selectively.

Under an honest 50% interval, P(>=36 of 44 inside) is about 1.3e-05, and P(>=11 of 12) about 3.2e-03. These intervals were far too wide.

Over-coverage is a failure in the same way under-coverage is. An interval that contains almost every outcome cannot be shown to be wrong, and a claim that cannot be wrong carries no information. It also produces no symptoms: outcomes keep landing inside, and nothing prompts an investigation.

Sample sizes are small (44 resolved 24h rows, 12 at 7d, none yet at 30d) and the eight pairs move together, so the effective number of independent observations is smaller still. Treat every number here as provisional. The 24h result is nonetheless far outside what sampling noise explains.

Diagnosis, including the hypothesis that was wrong

The obvious explanation - that the intervals were built from too much old, volatile history - was tested and rejected. Walk-forward across 20,058 observations on the same eight pairs, rebuilding the interval for each historical date from prior data only:

sample	core (target 50%)	wide (target 80%)
unconditional, all days	55.6%	85.3%
unconditional, calmest 20% of days	67.1%	92.1%
conditional, all days	50.8%	79.6%
conditional, calmest 20%	52.4%	79.1%

The distortion is mild on average and severe in quiet markets, because an unconditional interval carries a permanent allowance for turbulence that a calm regime has not earned. The live sample sat entirely in a calm stretch.

The remedy is conditioning, not truncation: keep only historical windows whose volatility at the window's open was within a tolerance of current volatility. Measuring at the close would select windows partly on what happened inside them, leaking the outcome into the sample.

One result kept because it is inconvenient: at a 30-day horizon the conditional interval comes out wider than the unconditional one (31.8% vs 23.7%), since calm periods have historically preceded larger monthly moves. A recalibration that only ever tightens is indistinguishable from tuning toward a flattering answer.

The anchors, and how to check them without trusting us

neuportal-bitcoin-anchors.csv - 310 Bitcoin attestations across 85 sealed documents, blocks 956500 to 960111. One row per attestation, with the document's SHA-256, the block height, that block's merkle root and its UTC time. A proof usually carries several attestations because the OpenTimestamps calendars are independent and confirm in different blocks; is_earliest = 1 marks the binding one, which is the tightest upper bound on when the document existed.

Checked on 2026-07-29 against a public block explorer: all 310 merkle roots match, zero discrepancies. Every one of the 144 forecasts has an anchor. Median time from sealing to Bitcoin confirmation is 28 minutes, worst case 58 minutes, and no forecast was confirmed into a block later than its own resolution time - which is the property that would have made the timestamps decorative.

What the hashes do and do not prove

They prove the bytes existed before the block that contains them. They say nothing about whether the forecast was any good - that is what the coverage column is for.

The anchors file has a narrower limit that is worth stating plainly, because it is the first thing a careful reader will probe. OpenTimestamps aggregates thousands of hashes into one merkle tree and only the root reaches the chain. So the block height and root in that file prove a block with this root existed at this time; they do not on their own prove our hash sits under that root. The path from a document to the root lives in the .ots file, and checking it needs the OTS client:

ots verify crypto-2026-07-20T232952Z-BTCUSDT.json.ots

Anyone building on the anchors table should keep that distinction. A query over block data can confirm the timing half of the claim and nothing more.

Rows sealed before 2026-07-28 use the unconditional method described above; the method column says which is which, so this is checkable rather than merely asserted. They were not re-sealed after the fix. Re-signing predictions after improving the method is the retroactive editing that makes most published track records meaningless; the record has to be allowed to contain the period before the fix.

As of 2026-07-29 every resolved row is still unconditional. The engine fix landed at 2026-07-28 12:03 UTC; the most recent resolved forecasts were sealed that morning at 08:48 UTC, four hours earlier. So the coverage above measures the broken method, and none of it is evidence that the fix worked. The corrected forecasts will be scored as a separate series rather than blended into the numbers above, so that they can fail visibly against the frozen baseline.

The unattested rows, and why they are not quietly relabelled

Twelve rows carry method = unattested. They were sealed after the engine fix but before a second bug was found: the engine computed a conditional flag for every band and the sealing step, which copies a hand-maintained list of fields into the object that gets hashed, silently dropped it. So for those twelve the sealed object - the only artefact with a timestamp - does not record which method produced it.

We know from the commit history which code was running, and for most symbols it was the conditional path. We are not writing that into the file anyway. A method label reconstructed from what we remember deploying is exactly the kind of after-the-fact annotation the hashing exists to prevent, and it would be wrong for at least one symbol: conditioning falls back to the unconditional sample when too few historical windows match the current regime, which happens per-symbol and is not recoverable from the commit log. These rows are therefore scored in neither series.

From 2026-07-30 the flag is carried inside the sealed object and attested by its timestamp.

Suggested uses

• Calibration benchmarking: a small, honestly-labelled set where the published intervals are known to be miscalibrated in a specific direction.
• Teaching material for coverage as a two-sided metric.
• A template for provenance: hash-before-publish, score-after, publish the misses.

Limitations

Short history, small resolved counts, and eight correlated crypto pairs - these are not independent instruments. The 30d horizon has no resolved rows at all yet. Not investment advice, and not a signal service.

Educational content - not financial advice.