SafeBets: “Prediction is going to outgrow the iGaming frame it is currently squeezed into”

At SBC Summit Americas, prediction markets were once again one of the industry’s most discussed topics, as operators, regulators, and investors continue debating where the sector fits between gambling, finance, and consumer technology. Among the companies looking to position themselves within that evolving landscape was SafeBets, a platform that argues prediction products can exist entirely without wagers, losses, or traditional betting mechanics.

In this interview with Yogonet, SafeBets CEO Alex Konanykhin discusses the company’s “winning without risk” model, its differentiation from operators such as Kalshi and Polymarket, and why he believes prediction platforms will eventually split into two distinct categories: wagering-based products regulated as gambling, and intelligence-driven forecasting platforms operating closer to fintech.

He also expands on SafeBets’ Collective Intelligence Engine, the company’s long-term sports engagement strategy, and the decision to build its ecosystem around its proprietary Unicoin token. The conversation also touches on the broader evolution of prediction-based products and whether the future of engagement can be built around forecasting skill rather than financial loss.

What conversations stood out most at SBC Summit Americas, and how did the industry react to your model?

The conversations that stood out were the ones that started skeptical and ended enthusiastic. People in this industry are used to a simple equation: engagement requires risk, and someone has to be willing to lose.

When we explained that SafeBets removes the wager entirely and still delivers the thrill of predicting and a real reason to come back, the first reaction was often that it could not possibly work as a business. Then we would walk through how the model is funded, and you could watch it click.

What were the main takeaways you wanted attendees to leave with from the “winning without risk” keynote?

Most people hear ‘prediction platform’ and immediately think ‘betting.’ Betting can be exciting, but it comes with real social harm: financial loss, addiction, and the damage that follows both.

The message we brought to SBC was that a socially beneficial version of a prediction platform is not just possible; it already exists. You can give people the full engagement of forecasting, and a real opportunity for skilled people anywhere in the world to be rewarded for their judgment, without the mechanism that causes the harm.

On SafeBets, no one wagers anything, so there is no money to lose and no addiction to feed. And because the wager is the very thing anti-gambling laws are written to govern, a platform without one is simply not what those laws were built to reach. The takeaway we wanted to leave with attendees is that the next chapter of this industry does not have to be built on people losing. It can be built on people being right.

What fundamentally differentiates your model from prediction market operators such as Polymarket or Kalshi?

One word: the wager. On Polymarket and Kalshi, you take part by putting your own money at risk, and for every winner there is a loser. That single design choice defines everything about those platforms, their economics, their regulatory exposure, and their ceiling.

SafeBets removes it. Our users never deposit, never stake, and never risk their own money. Because there is no wager, we are a prediction platform rather than a betting one, and we operate on fundamentally different ground than the wager-based operators. They are capped by how much their users are willing to lose. We are not, because no one loses. That is not a feature difference. It is a different category.

How does the Collective Intelligence Engine identify skilled forecasters and translate that into trading activity?

It starts with an honest scoreboard. Every prediction a user makes is measured against what actually happens in the real markets, time-stamped and unforgiving. Over time, that produces a track record- not just a win rate, but consistency, calibration, and how someone performs when the call is genuinely hard.

The platform weights forecasters by demonstrated skill, so the people who are truly good carry more signal than the lucky or the loud. The Collective Intelligence Engine aggregates those weighted signals into a view of where the strongest minds on the platform think markets are heading.

An affiliated trading operation then acts on that aggregated intelligence in real markets, and the returns from that activity, not user losses, are what fund the rewards. In plain terms, we find the people who read the world well, we listen to them in proportion to how right they have been, and we put that collective judgment to work.

As the sector evolves, where do prediction-based products fit within the broader iGaming and fintech ecosystems?

I think prediction is going to outgrow the iGaming frame it is currently squeezed into. Right now, the sector gets analyzed through a gambling lens because the early leaders adopted a gambling mechanic, the wager. Strip that out and what remains looks far more like fintech and applied intelligence than a sportsbook: people expressing informed views about the future and being rewarded for accuracy.

I expect prediction to split into two branches. One stays inside iGaming, regulated as betting, and lives or dies on that regulatory fight. The other, where we sit, moves toward fintech and consumer engagement, because it asks no one to gamble. As AI turns everyone into a forecaster, the products that win will be the ones that reward good judgment without demanding a stake for it.

How important do you expect sports and fan engagement to become within the platform’s long-term strategy?

Sports and fan engagement matter to us as an audience and an on-ramp, not as a betting product. The core of our platform is forecasting asset prices across crypto, commodity, stock, and currency markets, but the instinct we are tapping, the human urge to predict and to be proven right, is exactly what makes sports fandom so powerful.

We think about sports as one of the most natural communities to invite into a no-risk prediction experience, and about partnerships that celebrate skill and foresight rather than wagering. The line we will not cross is turning fan enthusiasm into a mechanism for people to lose money. Engagement, yes. Wagering, no.

Why build the ecosystem around a proprietary token rather than relying on fiat or established cryptocurrencies?

We made a deliberate choice to build SafeBets around a network token, Unicoin, rather than paying rewards in fiat. The practical reason is simple. Our forecasters are everywhere, and paying rewards in dozens of national currencies would be an operational, banking, accounting, and auditing nightmare. A single network token cuts through all of it and lets us reward skilled people anywhere in the world cleanly and instantly.

We looked hard at the alternatives, including dollar-pegged stablecoins like Tether. The concern with a stablecoin is that it inherits the long-run weakness of the currency it tracks, and fiat tends to lose purchasing power to inflation. We wanted Unicoin’s design to point the other way. SafeBets plans to direct a quarter of its revenues toward buying Unicoins and holding them in its Digital Asset Treasury, a mechanism intended to make the token deflationary by design rather than inflationary. Investors expect Unicoin to greatly increase in value and invested heavily into Unicoin.

But the bigger idea is what the token represents. We call Unicoin the Smart Coin for Smart People, because of how you earn it. Not by buying expensive hardware or burning energy, but by being right. On SafeBets, you mine Unicoin through what we call proof-of-intelligence: demonstrated forecasting skill. Unicoin may become a leading cryptocurrency, technologically superior to Bitcoin.