SafeBets Wants To Cull ‘High-Performing Predictors’ from Massive Sports and Politics User Base
The no-cash-deposit prediction platform is targeting 200 million users by 2030.
SafeBets is leaning on sports and politics to exponentially broaden its audience, while it expects financial market forecasts to be the key value driver of its trading model.
The platform allows users to forecast without putting in their own money. SafeBets tracks accuracy, then plans to roll the strongest forecasts into what it calls a Collective Intelligence signal, which affiliated operations would use to trade financial markets.
SafeBets currently offers forecasts across categories like cryptocurrency, commodities and major technology stocks. The company plans to add sports and political predictions ahead of the November election cycle.
In a Gambling Insider Q&A to be published next week, CEO Alex Konanykhin said that sports and politics are the only realistic path to their user target. However, they are a weaker source of trading profit than financial markets.
Our objective is to get to 200 million users by 2030, and that can only be done with sports and politics,” Konanykhin said.
Sports for Scale, Markets for P&L
Scale is central to SafeBets’ strategy of identifying the small share of users who consistently outperform other predictors.
Said Konanykhin:
For every person who feels that he or she is skillful enough to make predictions about market events, there are at least 100 people who would rather predict outcome of World Cup or similar sporting events.”
The larger user base would allow SafeBets to identify a smaller group of consistently accurate predictors. Konanykhin said that if 0.1% of a 200 million-user network emerged as top forecasters, that would leave the company with around 200,000 high-performing predictors whose signals could feed its Collective Intelligence model.
Unfortunately for us, those categories are those where we can get most users, but we are not going to make as much money by trading on the collective intelligence of those people,” he said.
For stocks, commodities, currencies and cryptocurrency, SafeBets plans to eventually have affiliated entities trade financial markets using signals generated by its strongest predictors. Konanykhin said the operation is expected to begin once SafeBets reaches sufficient scale, potentially as early as next year.
Sports and political signals could instead be monetized by trading on existing prediction markets. Konanykhin said SafeBets could use its collective intelligence to trade on platforms including Polymarket and Kalshi. Still, he noted that those markets are considerably smaller than the equity or commodities markets.
SafeBets argues the model sits outside gambling licensing because users do not deposit or wager their own money.
World Cup Contest Shows International Reach
SafeBets has already used sports to attract an international audience. The company said thousands of users participated in its World Cup prediction tournament, with participants forecasting outcomes across different stages of the competition.
The top three finishers were based in the U.K., the Netherlands and Colombia. Each received $10,000 in cash, along with Unicoin rewards ranging from 250,000 to 1,000,000 tokens. The company cited the contest as evidence that users are already making accurate predictions on the platform. in the U.S. and beyond.
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