SafeBets Targets Sports And Politics To Reach 200M Users

SafeBets lets users forecast outcomes without staking their own money. The platform tracks each user's accuracy and plans to roll the strongest forecasts into what it calls a Collective Intelligence signal, which affiliated operations would use to trade financial markets. 

It currently covers categories including cryptocurrency, commodities and major technology stocks, and plans to add sports and political predictions ahead of the November election cycle.

"Our objective is to get to 200 million users by 2030, and that can only be done with sports and politics," Konanykhin said. 

"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."

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The strategy hinges on scale. Konanykhin said that if just 0.1% of a 200 million-user network emerged as top forecasters, SafeBets would be left 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 have affiliated entities eventually trade financial markets using signals from its strongest predictors, an operation Konanykhin said could begin once the platform reaches sufficient scale, potentially as early as next year. 

Sports and political signals would instead be monetized by trading on existing prediction markets including Polymarket and Kalshi, though Konanykhin noted those markets are considerably smaller than equity or commodities markets. 

SafeBets argues its model sits outside gambling licensing because users do not deposit or wager their own money, a claim reported by Gambling Insider.

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SafeBets has already used sports to build an international audience, running a World Cup prediction tournament that drew thousands of entrants forecasting outcomes across different stages of the competition. 

The top three finishers, based in the UK, the Netherlands and Colombia, each received $10,000 in cash alongside Unicoin token rewards ranging from 250,000 to 1,000,000. 

The company cited the contest as evidence that users in the US and beyond are already making accurate predictions on the platform.