The prediction industry has become one of the fastest-growing corners of global finance. Combined monthly trading volume on the largest platforms has climbed to roughly $24 billion, and independent researchers, including Eilers and Krejcik and the investment bank Bernstein, project the sector could reach $1 trillion in annual trading volume by 2030. The human appetite to forecast the future, and to be rewarded for getting it right, is enormous, and it is global.

But the industry was built on a flaw, and I say that as someone who believes deeply in its promise. On every major platform, you take part by putting your own money at risk, and in the aggregate most participants end up worse off. That single fact is why regulators from Minnesota to Madrid to Paris have moved to shut these platforms down as unlicensed gambling. The very model that fueled the boom is the model now provoking a worldwide crackdown. We think that is not a temporary obstacle. We think it is a flaw in the design.

We built SafeBets.world to remove it. SafeBets is a prediction platform on which users never wager and never risk their own capital. Participants forecast the future prices of assets across crypto, commodity, stock, and currency markets. They make no deposit and place no bet. The platform scores every forecast against real, time-stamped market outcomes and rewards the most accurate predictors. Those rewards are not taken from other users’ losses. They are funded by our Collective Intelligence trading engine, which acts in real markets on the aggregated judgment of our best forecasters. No participant can lose money, because no participant puts any at risk.

This is not a small adjustment to the existing model. It is a different opportunity. Because our users never wager, our objective is to reach the people and the markets that wager-based platforms cannot. We can welcome the enormous audience that would never gamble but would happily test its judgment. And we can operate in jurisdictions that are closing their doors to betting-based platforms, one after another. Our aim is to build the leading platform in a category whose current leaders are being locked out of market after market, precisely because we have designed out the feature that gets them banned.

Realizing that objective takes capital. We have set out to raise $2.1 billion across a staged, multi-round roadmap to fund it, following the successful close of our initial round. That capital is intended to build out the Collective Intelligence trading engine that powers the rewards, to expand the platform globally, to invest in technology and talent, and to fund the reward pool that draws the world’s best forecasters. We are building infrastructure meant to scale with global financial markets, not a book that depends on players losing.

Our targets are deliberately ambitious. We aim to reach 200 million users and to build a platform generating substantial annual trading profits by the end of the decade, with a large share of those profits returned to our top predictors. I want to be precise about the nature of those figures: they are objectives and projections, not promises. The industry is young and fiercely competitive, and what we ultimately achieve will depend on execution and on conditions none of us fully controls. We share them because we believe in them, not because they are guaranteed.

What gives me conviction is the logic underneath the numbers. A platform that rewards skill rather than bankroll, and that funds those rewards through trading rather than through other people’s losses, is both a more responsible product and a structurally larger business. It removes the harms, the financial ruin and the addiction, that have turned regulators against this sector, and in doing so it unlocks the far larger audience those harms keep away. We intend to align our success with our users’ intelligence, not their misfortune.

For those who share that vision, the opportunity is to help build a category leader at the moment the category is being redefined. We intend to build it in the open, and to demonstrate that the future of prediction belongs to platforms that let people be right without asking them to risk being ruined. Those who wish to learn more are welcome to review our official materials.

Disclosure

This article reflects the views and objectives of the author. It contains forward-looking statements, including projections and targets, that involve risks and uncertainties; actual results may differ materially. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. Any offering of securities will be made only through official offering documents and only to eligible investors in accordance with applicable law. Nothing in this article constitutes investment, legal, tax, or financial advice.