Planned. Vane is designed but not built. This page states the intent and the influences. Nothing here is available on the API yet.
What it is
Every other Atlas layer indexes a place. Atlas Vane indexes an entity or a question. The name is the point: a weathervane shows which way the wind is blowing for a specific thing. Vane answers questions of the form what is the geopolitical exposure of this company, or which way is this situation trending, rather than how tense is this country.Why you should care
Country risk is a poor proxy for entity risk. A firm’s exposure is determined by where its facilities, counterparties, shipping routes, and regulatory relationships actually are — not by its country of domicile. A company headquartered in a calm country can be almost entirely exposed to a volatile one, and a country-level index will never show it. We already hold the join. GDELT Cloud resolves entities across news, corporate filings, energy and industrial assets, maritime movements, government awards, and screening lists. Vane is the layer that turns that join into a reading — entity exposure computed through the assets and relationships we can actually evidence, rather than inferred from a headquarters address. Anchoring beats asserting. Where a liquid prediction market exists for a geopolitical question, a real traded price is a better calibration anchor than a model’s own confidence. Vane is intended to use on-chain Polymarket prices as that anchor where they exist, and to be explicit when they do not.What it is useful for
- Portfolio and counterparty exposure. Which holdings are actually exposed to a developing situation, via which assets.
- Supply-chain risk. Exposure through facilities and shipping rather than through domicile.
- Situation tracking. A directional reading on a specific question, with the evidence attached.
- Calibration. Comparing a model-derived reading against a market price for the same question.
Design intent
- Evidence-bundled. Every reading ships with the specific events, filings, assets, and sources behind it. A reading you cannot audit is not useful for a risk memo.
- Explicitly not for screening. Vane is an analytical exposure reading, not a sanctions or compliance determination, and will be labeled as such. Compliance decisions belong to the screening surfaces, which are built for that purpose and carry the appropriate provenance.
- Market-anchored where possible. Polymarket on-chain prices as the calibration anchor for questions that have one. This was a deliberate choice over other venues for on-chain verifiability.
- Null where unevidenced. As everywhere in Atlas, an entity with insufficient linkage returns nothing rather than a confident-looking default.
Influences and references
Polymarket
On-chain prediction markets. Intended as the price anchor for question-conditioned readings, chosen for on-chain verifiability of settlement and price history.
The Good Judgment Project — Tetlock et al.
The forecasting-tournament literature establishing that well-calibrated probabilistic judgment is measurable, improvable, and best evaluated with proper scoring rules — the standard any Vane reading should be held to.
Firm-level political risk — Hassan, Hollander, van Lent & Tahoun
“Firm-Level Political Risk: Measurement and Effects,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 134(4), 2019. Demonstrates that political risk is meaningfully firm-specific and measurable from text — the academic grounding for indexing entities rather than places.