Hello Nick, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. How’s it going? Good — it’s nice being down this neck of the woods, it’s been a long time. For the listeners, Nick was actually my first boss. He introduced me to SEO. When was that? 2008. Lifetimes ago — almost 20 years now. Giving away my age. We share a similar story when it comes to marketing, and I got into SEO because of you. You’ve been doing SEO and digital marketing, you’ve built startups, and now you’re running a really interesting project — so I thought it’d be a good conversation to get you down and talk about prediction markets.

 

It’s a new world, and it’s constantly changing. There are quite a few of these platforms coming out right now. Being in iGaming for so long, you kind of need a bit of disruption — something to refresh and shake things up. A comparable shake-up would be Google and social media to the newspaper industry. Newspapers held on, fought tooth and nail, and have essentially given up now — they know they can’t beat it. Casinos online — there you go. The betting industry is as old as humans really. We like to speculate, and from a technology point of view there have been some massive changes in the past 20 years. Blockchain technology — and I hate calling it blockchain technology, I feel like an old academic when I say it — but it’s incredibly disruptive across many industries. Betting and gambling, though I don’t necessarily see prediction markets exactly in that light, will definitely feel pressure from the crypto industry, because crypto was always going to move into most things in the end.

 

Quick backstory — how did you get from SEO to prediction markets?

Let me start at the marketing end. I did SEO for many years across loads of different industries — iGaming, hospitality, basically everything. This was back when there weren’t really niches. You worked for an agency, they brought work in, and you serviced whatever was out there. Then I broke out on my own and worked as a consultant, focusing mostly on app store optimisation and app marketing, which was really fun. I tend to get bored after about six to eight years doing the same thing — my attention drifts, “we’re just doing the same thing over and over.” So I broke out again. Coming to the end of my app marketing time was machine learning and AI. I did some intensive courses, learned to code, and had a YouTube channel called The Data Boy where I taught marketers that what’s happening right now was coming, and they’d better get their finger out or they’d be out of work.

 

Roughly the same time I started to really understand Bitcoin and was lucky enough to be living in London. Through a friend I got introduced to Coinscrum, which to this day is one of the oldest, longest-standing crypto events globally. All the OGs from crypto went through that door. Brian Armstrong — pretty much every name. People don’t understand this: the whole crypto movement was more or less in London, because of the finance industry and the technical talent. There are people who suggest the team behind Satoshi was in London at that time. Ethereum was launched in London — Vitalik and Gavin Wood actually met through Coinscrum. There’s a blue plaque on the wall now: “Ethereum launched here.” People don’t realise the UK was the hub, and the government killed it with regulation.

 

I got into crypto through that and through the right people — I was never really into the scammy stuff or pumping. We were looking to disrupt industries, make things fairer for people, and cheaper. If blockchains aren’t making life cheaper, I don’t know what we’re doing. So prediction markets ended up being a natural progression. Around 2019/2020 there were prediction markets in crypto before Polymarket — Augur was one of them, there’s another one whose name I can’t remember that claims to have been first. There’s a bit of beef between them — not heavy beef, not 90s rap beef, but “I was first online” beef. Then Polymarket came along, and Kalshi, who I think launched around 2019. Kalshi has all the rails of a traditional betting company. Polymarket has crypto rails — and there are things you can do because of that which you can’t do with a Web2 business.

 

How do prediction markets differ from traditional sports betting?
Putting on my crypto-ideology hat: betting is everywhere. Financial markets are betting. Buying property and renting it out and speculating on the price is betting. The first humans who planted seeds and waited for them to grow — that was a bet. Farmers bet every year. It’s everywhere.

 

Where I see prediction markets, particularly real crypto-native prediction markets — Kalshi in the US is trying to push into crypto, but I’ve yet to see anything materially comparable to Polymarket. When I look at Polymarket, I see a DeFi ecosystem sitting behind it. You get decentralised finance — you can lend, borrow, yield. I also see a data industry being built around it, and that’s important. There is no intrinsic value outside of the sports industry for sports data. You can’t use it to predict an outcome outside of sports. With prediction markets, you can.

 

So the way I see prediction markets right now: it’s the front-end “killer app” use case for crypto that crypto hasn’t really had. Crypto’s been around for years and nobody knows what the killer app is. For me, right now, the killer app is prediction markets. It’s a really easy way to onboard people into crypto rails and get them using cryptocurrencies instead of fiat. The fact that sports is the biggest category in all prediction markets has less to do with the technology and more to do with humans — sports betting is natural, particularly in the UK and Europe. There are bookies, it’s not taboo. In the US it’s incredibly taboo — I read comments on posts and people say things like “you are the devil, you will die.” There are some strange ideologies around someone speculating on their favourite team.

 

Can you give a real example of using prediction markets beyond sports?
Polymarket pushes this narrative more than anyone: we’re looking for data that helps us predict the world. Sports is just an easy onboarding tool. A perfect example: end of last summer I wasn’t sure which way Bank of England interest rates were going to move. There’s a market for this on Polymarket — interest rates have been on there for ages. It’s important to study interest rates if you have debt. I started getting letters from a bank saying “lock in your interest rate now because we know it’s going to get a bit shaky in the next couple of weeks.” There was a rate change coming, and I thought rates weren’t going up — I thought this was the banks trying to get us to lock in higher rates so they made more money. I went on Polymarket. It reflected what I believed, and it also reflected what other people I know who watch this stuff all the time were hinting at. And rates didn’t go up.

 

So I used that data to decide what to do with my mortgage. You can’t do that with a sportsbook. And it’s incredibly difficult to do with financial markets unless you’re a specialist — that takes years to understand. If I want to go to a single page that gives me the probability of what the crowd thinks is going to happen, I’m not going to find it on a sportsbook or a bank — I’m going to find it on a prediction market.

 

Then if you want to dig into the nitty-gritty: say I bought that position six months before the announcement. Because of crypto rails, I can borrow against that position, or hedge it. You can’t do that with sportsbooks. There’s a much bigger data play, a much more emerging financial toolset for everyday people.

 

What’s the regulatory picture for prediction markets right now?
It’s unknown at this point. People will say it’s absolutely gambling, but let me be very clear: if you’re running a crypto-rails business, we don’t hold your money and we don’t set your odds. The market sets the odds. The money is held in smart contracts and the platforms don’t care which way the market moves. Find me a sportsbook that says that. The sportsbook model is they set the price, they are the house.

 

Betting exchanges are the closest comparable to a prediction market — that’s a fair comparison. But betting exchanges don’t have any of the rails that make prediction markets useful outside of sports betting. They’re set up for betting, not for surfacing information, finding accurate prices, or hedging. Prediction markets can do all of those things, which makes them more valuable to different audiences.

 

Outside the US, prediction markets will probably be regulated through gambling commissions — until the point where that doesn’t fit anymore, because once your prediction market isn’t just sports but also cultural markets, geopolitics, and commodities, it sits flatly between financial markets and betting. We will need different regulatory frameworks. One emerging point is around insider trading, which people are very split on — should it be allowed as part of surfacing the truth and getting accurate prices, or suppressed because people may get injured?

 

How do you actually stop insider trading in a prediction market?
Do you want to stop it? That’s the question. If somebody at the council is privy to information before everyone else, and they don’t control the decision but they have early access, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that — because what we’re trying to find is efficient pricing. We’re trying to source accuracy. Truth is a tricky word — truth changes depending on the light in the room — so I prefer “accuracy.”

 

If you draw the comparison to media: any pundit can go on a news show and say whatever they like. There’s no cost to whether they’re right or wrong, and people might use that information and get it wrong. Whereas if you go to a prediction market first, or use one to validate what a pundit said, you’ll get closer to accuracy. People use the word “truth” — I don’t like it because it’s flexible. Accuracy isn’t flexible. You either buy at the right price and sell at a higher price, or you buy at the wrong price.

 

And that goes right down to the local level. If somebody’s pregnant and you and ten friends bet on whether it’s a boy or a girl — who’s getting hurt? Nobody’s being injured.

 

Tell us about Populace — how does it differ from Polymarket and Kalshi?
The big players right now are Kalshi and Polymarket, and they’re essentially centralised question-asking. Their communities can suggest markets, but in the end Kalshi and Polymarket have to manage their liquidity with liquidity partners, so they only create markets they think will draw a lot of volume. That’s totally fine — it makes commercial sense.

 

I come from the world of trying to decentralise everything because I think it’s fairer. If we think of markets as user-generated content — and we look at Instagram, Reddit, the early Huffington Post — what happens when we let anybody create a market? And by anybody, I don’t mean any market they like — we have controls in place so we don’t get abusive or racist markets. But what data pipelines do we get from “some guy in Glasgow” creating a market about something he knows a lot about? Take the Glasgow Central Station fire — when will it reopen? How much will it cost the city to rebuild? Glasgow City Council has to buy the plot and then £500 million on top. These are interesting, super-niche markets that won’t need huge volume but could have lots of trading activity within them. And again, if it’s built on DeFi rails: take a position now, lend against it, cash it in later. It’s a really interesting way of allowing people to speculate on their daily lives in a relatively safe way, because the only person you’re betting against is your counterparty.

 

How do you handle market resolution at scale?
Sports is dead easy — get a high-quality, trusted sports API and you can verify how a game resolved, how many red cards were given, all of that. Financial data, easy. Crypto data, easy. Where it becomes very, very difficult to do at scale is the resolution of cultural markets.

 

People may remember the Zelensky suit market on Polymarket — when he visited Trump and the question was “will he wear a suit?” To the general public he wore a suit. But there was nuance in the rules that allowed it to be resolved as “no, he didn’t wear a suit.” All sorts of arguments. This is happening on Polymarket quite a lot.

 

Rules are everything in prediction markets. Read the rules. If you don’t understand them, copy and paste them into a language model and get it to explain them to you like you’re a dummy, and find the gaps — because a lot of money is being made by people not interpreting the rules correctly. The devil is in the detail. Rules will get clearer over time as people with real understanding come in and say “in this circumstance, you’re not accounting for X, Y and Z.”

 

If you’re trying to scale resolutions that aren’t database- or data-driven, you can’t just plumb into a trusted API — you need to put it to consensus. Polymarket works on consensus through a protocol called UMA. Anybody can say “I think this market should resolve in X direction” — they put up a bounty (size depends on the market), and the community votes. The issue is this: if the value of the market resolving in one direction is greater than the cost of using your governance tokens to sway it, you’ll swing the market in that direction. That has happened on Polymarket. It’s a totally legal rug in some respects. So resolutions in decentralised prediction markets in Web3 are still an ongoing problem. We’re looking at this seriously and have ideas around validators to sign things off. It’s not just a fancier sportsbook — the technology stack is completely different. We have to decentralise everything to make it fair, allow it to scale, and make sure there’s a cost to abusing it.

 

What are the go-to marketing channels for prediction markets?
Because it’s crypto, you can’t really advertise — you can, but it’s a nightmare. Out of that constraint, the crypto KOL was born. Love it or hate it, it’s part of the beast.

So typically we’d be going with KOLs. There’s an SEO component too — technical needs to be sorted, and if you want to go head-to-head with a sportsbook you’ll need link building. But for go-to-market, we niche down into a specific region and work with KOLs who understand those local markets, the entertainment culture, what’s going on there. They can create markets around local musicians and local events.

 

To give an example of a big prediction market push: Kalshi, last year, during the “badge wars” on Twitter, when they and Polymarket had raised loads of money. They started handing out badges wholesale and Kalshi hired top crypto influencers into their team to bullpost it. It worked for a couple of months. Being a bit of a veteran, I knew it was a three-month max play — eventually people would get sick of the prediction market noise. Twitter formally announced they were downgrading prediction market content, and now X is essentially cooked for prediction market reach because the algorithm is weighted against it.

But this KOL movement is a crypto thing. If you’re looking for a job in crypto and you don’t know somebody who can vouch for you or have a big audience, you’re not getting a job — because crypto wants you to come on with a following and post out to it. Another example: last summer, Leo Trades and Alex Becker (the SEO guy) teamed up to launch a DEX — I think on Avalanche — with one of them as CEO. They bullposted that to the top of the DEX rankings within a week. We’re talking competing with Uniswap. Most trades were going through that platform, and that was basically just two KOLs with huge audiences. To bring it closer to gambling: Roobet — basically made into a giant by one big crypto streamer doing the same thing.

So if you can find the right partner and embed them in the company, they’re less likely to lose attention and move on. That’s the issue with KOLs — their attention. We’re looking at big tipsters and crypto KOLs. I don’t know how much difference there is between a tipster and a KOL — KOLs tend to bring more lifestyle content; tipsters are more “I’m on point with this.” For me it’s about performance: who drives the most users to us. The ones who really perform, we make our country head — they understand what’s happening on the ground.

This is really important. We did some pushes into countries, and as soon as we dialled in on local content the metrics went insane — engagement went from 3% to 45% on a tiny scrappy little campaign that we paid almost nothing for. That’s what I want more of. I want it to be local. I want it to mean something. I want people to get excited because it’s the music they listen to, the show they watch on TV at night. We saw a lot of Bad Bunny markets on Polymarket — let’s do that for non-English-speaking countries, where there are huge artists who don’t sing in English.

 

How important is community as a moat?
You could copy our tech — in crypto we tend to make everything open source. We won’t be immediately, but after a generation or two we’ll probably open-source the original product the way Uniswap did, so people can build DEXes off it. The only real moat any business ever has is its community.

If you treat them well — and this is internalised in me, this is what I want to see in my business — I want to enrich everybody who participates. That’s why we give 1% of trade fees to the KOL or anyone who creates a market. That’s why we’re looking at building yield into deposits, because with DeFi it’s Lego blocks — we plug in something like Aave so your $50 sitting in there earns yield. How do we give back? That’s a very different mentality from centralised anything. Centralised everything is about extraction. We’re about giving back. As long as we stay on side with our community, are fair, and are transparent, why would they leave?

I’ve seen people leave Polymarket for Kalshi, by the way, almost exclusively because of how Polymarket has handled certain resolutions. These are people who properly trade and generate fees on these platforms. Why wouldn’t you listen to them when they have problems? You can do all the marketing budget you want, get all the KOLs, but if you don’t treat your community right, they will leave. They’re your moat — they protect you from your competitor. It’s basically acquisition and retention. KOLs bring the top of the funnel; it’s up to us to make sure the people who arrive are happy and earning.

Comparison: in DeFi summer 2020, OpenSea launched, did huge volume, and then Rarible came along and slashed fees. You saw the death cross — OpenSea is still around but they were too expensive. If your prediction market community can go elsewhere and get the same markets and same liquidity for cheaper, you’ll have to lower your fees. You have to listen to community to build a good product.

 

Is SEO a core channel for prediction markets?
Not currently, but I don’t think SEO is ever not a core channel. It’s a natural discovery channel and the quality of leads you get when you rank for the right stuff with the right pages is undeniable. From my point of view it’s about brand visibility. To rank a market we run that’s directly comparable to a sportsbook market, we’d have to spend a great deal of money to compete until we’re a huge brand.

But there are loads of niche, long-tail prediction markets that sportsbooks don’t compete on at all — and that’s the bit I’m really interested in. We have the core fixtures and the core elections, but the fastest-growing market a couple of months ago was “mention markets” — things like, how many times will Donald Trump say “great” in a press conference? Pure speculation as entertainment. With a traditional platform, you couldn’t really touch that.

Resolutions on those are funny too — Trump was talking, and one of the trigger words was actually shouted by someone in the audience. So how do you resolve that, unless the rules say he has to say it explicitly? Lots of fun, interesting cultural moments come out of these. I’m calling them “culture markets” because we don’t really have another term for anything that isn’t a structured sport, commodity, or financial instrument. I see that being a huge area of growth. It’s long-tail — most won’t have huge volume — but it’ll start to source information we’re not used to. If you’re super geeky about Star Wars, you could create markets and there might be tens of thousands of people who’d trade them. Or what colour shoes Nike will release this year. Tastemakers are perfectly placed to create markets in their niche and earn from them, whether through trading or being paid for the market.

I just keep thinking of all the angles you can use for digital PR with this. You could do an entire category of prediction markets about SEO rankings of a brand. Every community, everything — that’s what makes it so magical.

Where do you think prediction markets go in the next five years?
It hasn’t really left the US yet. The way prediction markets are talked about in mainstream media — I was sent an article yesterday in The Guardian about a journalist in Israel being sent death threats by a market because they reported something. That’s not okay. But it’s also interesting because it does hold journalists accountable for accuracy. If you’re not accurate and you’re telling lies and the market knows it, you should get in trouble.

Realistically, the noise right now is a US story — there’s a proxy war between state-level and federal-level betting regulation. Populace is explicitly not interested in Europe or the US. We’re going into niche markets all over the world to see what gets built out from them.

Take last year’s wildfires in the US. There were loads of prediction markets around them. If you’re watching them and you believe they’re accurate, and your house is in the firing line, that’s a very good source of information — and you can use it as a hedge. If you can’t get insurance because you’re in a fire line, you can use prediction markets to hedge that.

There’s a narrative emerging in the US around hedging your health on prediction markets. Maybe somebody worked in a place with asbestos exposure and the insurance company won’t cover them because they think they’ll get cancer — but the person believes their actual risk is low. You could build a market around that and find a counterparty to take the bet. You can do it with property, you can do it with crops. If you’re a farmer in a region that’s experiencing dry weather and you can’t get crop insurance because the data says one thing, but you’re on the ground and you understand it differently, you can create a market and find someone willing to take the other side. Weather markets are huge — people make a lot of money from them, and now with language models anyone can pull in data and form a view, but the human on the ground may know something the model doesn’t.

This is why I talk about prediction markets as a financial instrument. That’s maybe five to ten years off, once we have proper resolution systems and regulatory frameworks. But there’s nothing structurally stopping us from going there. Sports and geopolitics are low-hanging fruit that everyone understands. Everything else needs more sophistication, but it’s understandable long-term.

Further down the line, regulation will absolutely shape what these markets are and aren’t allowed to do. Right now we’re in experimentation phase — gray, not fully understood. The US situation isn’t really relevant to anywhere else; that’s a state-vs-federal proxy war specific to America. In the UK and Europe we’re used to top-down regulation, so what you can do is sit down with regulators, share your ideas, and get feedback. Not talking to regulators is ridiculous — it shapes your product, helps with raising money, and helps you plan for the future. I see prediction markets moving into the financial-instrument and information-accuracy space, and that’s going to need a bridge between gambling regulation and financial regulation, or a brand new authority entirely. With crypto we already saw a totally new thing get squeezed under financial-instrument rules, and the UK has been one of the worst places in the world to run a crypto business as a result. Regulators need to start seeing the world from a technology point of view — because with blockchain you can give them transparency they can’t get anywhere else, real-time access to every transaction, automated guard rails that don’t exist in centralised businesses.

 

Is this just betting with extra steps?
I like to look at it as kind of hyper-capitalism. If everything has a cost and you’re trying to maximise the return on that cost, you’re going to do your best not to take the wrong position. The Guardian article situation — who knows where a bomb is going to land. They were all working on probability and turned out to be wrong, somebody saw a bomb land somewhere, and that threw the market into disarray. So I see two layers: speculation as entertainment with the right controls to keep people safe, and robust financial instruments that everyday people can use to hedge against their actual life circumstances — provided you can resolve the market accurately.

 

Where can people find Populace?
We’re on mainnet on Base — Coinbase’s blockchain. We have a contract set up so as soon as you create an account, you get fake tokens airdropped automatically and we cover the gas fees, so you can go in there and play with the product without any cost. We jokingly called it USDP instead of USDC. Just go to the site and arrive. You don’t need to be crypto-native — we’ve not built this for crypto-natives. If you have a wallet you can sign up that way, but if you only have a phone number, email, or Telegram, you can sign up with that too. The experience will be slightly different from a sportsbook because you have to sign wallet transactions, but if you’ve never used crypto before, this is the one to use — I guarantee you’ll be able to.

We’re raising right now. We’re doing our pre-seed and we have our go-to-market strategy, which I’ll not share here in case someone front-runs me, but we’re confident — the right people are in the right place. If you’re interested in investing in prediction markets and you come to us, you’re early.

 

Nick, awesome — nice to have you. We’re seeing all these new markets actually come out, and it’d be really interesting to work for one at some point. I keep thinking about all the angles you could use, and you can see this becoming massive — to the point that it could dwarf a traditional sportsbook or casino in terms of rankings and the sheer number of active pages. It’s a really exciting concept. Yeah — it was great coming down. Thanks a lot.