Please follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Truth Social, Gettr, X, Youtube, Instagram

New York-based startup SafeBets offers a novel perspective on the rapidly growing world of prediction markets – users can now forecast markets without risking a single dollar.

All you have to do is sign up for the platform, at SafeBets.world, and verify your identity. Then you get 100 “unicoins” for free. With those unicoins you can predict prices for Bitcoin, gold, oil and the stock prices of big companies. A prediction is a concrete price target, not a simple yes/no question. For example: where do you think Bitcoin will close on Friday? Or: how much will an ounce of gold be worth next week? Every prediction costs one unicoin, and if you were wrong, you lose one token. But if your prediction was correct, your balance will grow.

MoneyTimes distinguishes SafeBets from other prediction markets, as there is no deposit of money and unicoins cannot be bought. Thus, the user who exhausts his 100 unicoins with his predictions simply stops forecasting. There is no overdraw and thus no debt. That is very different from most other fields of finance.

So how exactly does SafeBets plan to monetize this model? In a departure from typical prediction markets that pit users against one another, SafeBets says it will use the combined foresight of its best predictors to inform its own trading in actual markets. To do this, the company uses a ranking system known as the Filtration Pyramid that scores users by the accuracy of their past predictions. Those who prove to be the most accurate will have the greatest say in SafeBets’ trades. When SafeBets does make money on a given trade, it says it will award half of the profits to the top predictors in the form of unicoin, which users can then exchange for cash on the broader Unicoin market. The company calls the idea “proof-of-intelligence”: the network rewards forecasting skill rather than computing power or capital. CEO Alex Konanykhin sums up the pitch this way, according to IBTimes: “Our users risk nothing. The platform takes the risk, makes the profit, and shares it with the people whose insights generated the trade.”

SafeBets is building on some interesting historical ideas, according to IBTimes, including those of economist Robin Hanson, who has argued since the 1990s that aggregated forecasts can beat expert judgment, and thus the Iowa Electronic Markets, which for years predicted U.S. presidential outcomes more accurately than polling averages. The corporate prediction markets at such places as Hewlett-Packard, Google, and Microsoft have reported superior forecasting to other approaches, and SafeBets is betting that the same type of intelligence can also be used to gain an edge in publicly traded markets.

According to MoneyTimes, the company is projecting 200 million users by 2030 and aiming to reach more than $10 billion in trading profit once the platform is fully scaled. Those are targets, not results. MoneyTimes also notes the fine print: awards are discretionary, most users will not earn much, if anything, and cash-outs run through the cryptocurrency market, so values can move. The free tokens are essentially a means by which users can test the waters to see if they are one of the very rare individuals that actually have some skill at predicting the markets and earning a return.

SafeBets is part of a portfolio run by TransparentBusiness Inc., previously known as Unicoin Inc., which has an unresolved dispute with the Securities and Exchange Commission over its earlier offerings. SafeBets itself has not been the subject of SEC action, IBTimes reports.

But for now, SafeBets is worth keeping an eye on, as it represents a fresh perspective in the rapidly evolving space of prediction markets — a space usually dominated by the thrill of wagering money on forecasts.

'NO AD' subscription for CDM! Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!