NEXTpredict

Thanks @CryptoGamr and @nextpredictio for the ticket, saved me $2,000. Walked in expecting a room full of gamblers. Walked out after two days talking with the smartest young people in America, half of them Ivy grads. My takeaway: prediction markets feel a lot like crypto in 2017. Prediction markets aren't new. People have been betting on elections and games forever. What changed was the 2024 election. The markets called it better than the polls, and suddenly everyone was paying attention. The reason this works in the US: in most states, sports betting needs a separate state license. Prediction markets go through federal derivatives regulation instead. They're event contracts, closer to a swap or an option than a bet. Right now the whole industry is waiting to see where the rules land. The crowd surprised me. Very young. Very educated. A lot of people who've never worked in crypto. Some came from TradFi, some are just political junkies. And nobody thinks like a banker. Nobody has "5 years of prediction market experience" because that doesn't exist yet. Tickets were $1-2k. Over a thousand people flew into NYC from all over for this. People don't spend that kind of money unless they're making it. There's a lot of overlap with crypto. Same users, same builders, some of the same infra. But I think this grows faster in the US. You don't need a wallet or to understand a chain. You just need an opinion, and everyone has an opinion on politics and sports. The big unknown is regulation. Sports is the biggest driver of volume right now, and it might also be the first thing that gets restricted. States and the feds are still fighting it out. It's a gray zone, and that's exactly why it's interesting. What the industry is short on isn't engineers. It's people: sales, BD, marketing, growth, policy, and people who can take this global. Get in now and you become the "experienced hire" in two years. Same thing happened in crypto. Last thing: the gender ratio at the event was about 20:1. Ladies, this industry needs you.