What happens when the house always wins, and nobody questions the house?
That question sits at the centre of a $112 billion global sports betting industry where the vast majority of volume flows through sportsbooks that set their own prices, manage risk internally, and routinely limit or ban users who win too often. For decades, this model has been the only game in town. But a new wave of blockchain-based prediction exchanges is now attempting to rewrite the rules, and Pred just raised $2.5 million to prove it can build the infrastructure fast enough to matter.
The Funding and Who Is Behind It
The round was led by Accel, one of the most established venture firms in technology investing, with a portfolio that includes companies like Spotify, Slack, and Flipkart. Participating alongside Accel were the Base Ecosystem Fund (BEF) by Coinbase Ventures, which invests specifically in projects building on Coinbase's Layer 2 blockchain, and Reverie, a crypto-native advisory and investment firm founded by former Digital Currency Group and Blockchain Capital alumni. The capital will go toward team expansion, liquidity development, and global user onboarding.
Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel, explains,
"Prediction markets have proven their value for episodic events, but sports represent an entirely different scale of opportunity, continuous, global, and deeply liquid. Pred is building purpose-built infrastructure for this market rather than retrofitting general-purpose tools. That's the kind of focused execution we back."
The involvement of BEF by Coinbase Ventures is particularly notable. It signals that Coinbase views sports prediction trading as a meaningful use case for Base, its Layer 2 network that has become home to a growing ecosystem of decentralized applications. For Pred, building on Base provides 200-millisecond transaction finality and gas fees measured in fractions of a cent, both of which are non-negotiable for a platform where odds can shift within seconds of a goal, injury, or red card.
What Pred Actually Does, and Why It Matters
To understand what Pred is building, you first need to understand what a prediction exchange is and how it differs from a sportsbook. Think of it this way: a traditional sportsbook is like a store. The store sets the prices, decides what is on the shelf, and profits when you lose. A prediction exchange, by contrast, is like a stock exchange for sports outcomes. Buyers and sellers trade directly with each other, and prices emerge from real supply and demand rather than being set by a central operator.
On Pred, users buy and sell positions on sports outcomes through a transparent order book. If you believe a team will win and the market undervalues that probability, you buy a position. If the market moves in your favour before the event concludes, you can sell that position to another trader for a profit, without waiting for the game to end. This is fundamentally different from placing a bet with a sportsbook and hoping for the best.
Amit Mahensaria, CEO and Co-Founder of Pred, explains,
"Sports prediction is a $500B global industry still running on infrastructure that punishes winners. We built Pred to change that, a decentralised exchange where speed, transparency, and skill are rewarded, not penalised."
The platform claims spreads under 2% and 200-millisecond execution, which brings it closer to financial exchange standards than anything the traditional sports betting world offers. Pred is currently live in private beta with an invite-only onboarding programme.
The $44 Billion Context: Prediction Markets Have Already Arrived
Pred is not entering an empty market. It is entering one experiencing a historic acceleration. According to data compiled by Keyrock and Dune Analytics, prediction markets collectively processed over $44 billion in notional trading volume in 2025, a figure driven overwhelmingly by two platforms: Polymarket and Kalshi. Together, these two platforms accounted for roughly 85% to 90% of total volume, forming what The Block has described as a "de facto duopoly."
But here is the critical nuance: most of that volume has been concentrated in politics, macroeconomics, and one-off cultural events. Sports, despite being the largest category of global wagering activity, remains relatively underdeveloped in the prediction market ecosystem. Kalshi has moved aggressively into sports, with approximately 87% of its recent activity coming from sports contracts, but the broader opportunity is enormous and largely untapped by peer-to-peer exchanges.
The global sports betting market was valued at approximately $112 billion in 2025, with projections suggesting growth to over $187 billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 11%. Mainstream players have noticed. FanDuel partnered with CME Group. DraftKings acquired CFTC-certified exchange Railbird. Robinhood integrated Kalshi's markets into its app. The sports prediction market is being treated as a new asset class, and capital is flooding in accordingly. Just this month, rival platform Opinion raised $20 million in a pre-Series A round backed by Hack VC and Jump Crypto.
What Makes Pred Different from Polymarket or Kalshi
Polymarket built its reputation on political and geopolitical prediction markets. Its odds on the 2024 US presidential election were cited by mainstream media outlets, legitimizing the entire category. Kalshi took a regulated, US-centric approach and became the first CFTC-registered platform to offer sports event contracts nationwide. Both platforms are now valued in the billions.
Pred is not trying to replicate either model. Its thesis is narrower and more specific: sports prediction markets need purpose-built infrastructure designed for the speed, frequency, and liquidity patterns unique to sports. A football match generates dozens of tradeable moments within 90 minutes. An NFL Sunday features over a dozen simultaneous games. This is not an election that happens once every four years. It is continuous, global, and deeply liquid.
According to Mahensaria's interview with DL News, the core insight is behavioural:
"When you can flip or change your predictions without any loss or vig, you start trading instead of betting and praying."
The exchange model, he argues, converts passive bettors into active traders, and that shift in behaviour is what creates sustainable volume and market depth.
Mahensaria is not a crypto-native founder stepping into sports for the first time. He previously co-founded Impartus Innovations, an edtech company that was acquired by upGrad in 2021 and scaled to two million users. He is an alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Lucknow, and has been involved in sports trading for over two decades.
The Challenges Ahead
Raising $2.5 million is a start, not a finish line. Pred faces significant headwinds. Liquidity is the single greatest challenge for any new exchange, and bootstrapping a two-sided marketplace where traders need other traders to execute against is notoriously difficult. The platform is not yet publicly available, and its invite-only beta means real market validation is still ahead.
Regulatory complexity adds another layer. Pred explicitly states it does not operate in India, Singapore, the US, or OFAC-sanctioned countries, which excludes three of the largest potential markets for sports prediction trading. The US prediction market landscape in particular is evolving rapidly, with CFTC oversight creating opportunities for regulated platforms like Kalshi while creating barriers for decentralized entrants.
Competition is fierce. Beyond Polymarket and Kalshi, platforms like Sporttrade operate under state-level sports betting licenses, and PredictBase already occupies the Base blockchain niche. FanDuel and DraftKings, with millions of existing users, are adding prediction market features to their established platforms.
My Final Thoughts
Pred is making a focused bet that sports prediction markets need their own exchange infrastructure, not general-purpose tools adapted after the fact. The backing from Accel, BEF by Coinbase Ventures, and Reverie provides credibility and strategic alignment, particularly the Coinbase connection through the Base ecosystem. Whether a $2.5 million seed round is sufficient ammunition to compete in a market where incumbents are raising hundreds of millions is the central question, but the thesis itself is sound. The global sports betting industry generates over $100 billion annually, and the exchange model represents a structural improvement over the sportsbook model for traders who approach sports analytically.
The timing aligns with what could be the most significant catalyst in prediction market history: the 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted across North America. If Pred can build liquidity, onboard skilled traders, and deliver on its speed and spread promises before that event, it will have a genuine opportunity to carve out a position in what is rapidly becoming one of the most contested verticals in both crypto and sports finance.
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