For decades, sports bettors have been fighting an uphill battle against a model that does everything in its power to ensure the house always wins. For a successful sports bettor, traditional sportsbooks are not your friend – they’re adversaries, notorious for kneecapping those who win too often, either by limiting them to betting no more than a few cents or banning them entirely. Their model is to punish excellence.
But a structural change is coming. Amit Mahensaria, co-Founder and CEO of PRED, is leading bettors away from the smoke-and-mirrors of traditional bookies, introducing them to the concept of the high-speed “sports exchange” that’s modeled on its counterparts in the traditional financial world. An EdTech pioneer and investment manager, Mahensaria has hit on a way to apply the rigor of Wall Street orderbooks to the adrenaline of live sports.
If he gets his way, punters will no longer be forced to fight the enormous resources of the “house,” but instead be able to trade their knowledge and insights on a peer-to-peer exchange where the only thing that limits them is their personal analytical edge.
1. You spent years working in EdTech, focusing on structured, institutional learning. How did your long experience in that industry lead to your decision to switch focus to decentralized sports prediction markets? I mean, it’s hard to identify a real link between the two industries.
I spent years in EdTech learning how to make complex products approachable. How to make simple products that are engaging. Sports trading has the same shape from a product perspective. There's a thing people care about deeply, and the existing infrastructure underserves them.
The link most people miss is that in both categories, the user has more analytical capacity than the system gives them credit for. Schools treat students as passive recipients. Sportsbooks treat bettors as marks to be managed. PRED starts from the opposite assumption, that the user is a participant who can think for themselves. That's the through-line.
I've also spent years around markets where pricing matters. Sports outcomes have been priced badly for decades because the dominant model needs the bettor to be wrong for the operator to make money. Moving to an exchange model is the structural correction. I wanted to be on the side, building it.
2: Before moving into EdTech, you were an investment manager. Has that background influenced the way you have structured PRED and its prediction markets?
Yes, directly. When you've sat on the buy side, you internalize a few things that change how you think about any market. Order books are how serious traders price things. Information should flow to participants, not be gated. The platform shouldn't trade against you. Spreads tell you the truth about a market's depth.
PRED is built around those assumptions. We run an order book, not a book that the house balances. Every match has another trader on the other side. Liquidity is visible. Spreads are real. None of that is unusual in finance; it's table stakes. What's strange is that none of it existed for sports outcomes at any scale until exchanges started entering the category, and even then, most operators are still running variants of the old book model.
Coming from investment management, the design decisions are obvious. You build the thing you'd want to use yourself.
3: Why did you create PRED? What are the problems with traditional sportsbooks, and how does PRED’s prediction markets solve them
Category matters here. Crypto rails alone don't make something an exchange. Plenty of offshore sportsbooks accept crypto deposits and still run a traditional book against the user. We're not that, and we're not a generic prediction market that added sports as one category among many. Pred is a sports-first order book exchange built on Base, where settlement is on-chain, and matching is peer-to-peer. Architecture is the differentiator. The rails are how we settle it.
We are creating PRED to give live sports traders the trading experience that moves at the speed of a live match. Traders should have the assurance of the best odds and a larger variety of markets in a live match, which general-purpose prediction markets will find it tough to offer.
4: Those coming from sportsbooks are used to seeing the “house” always winning, due to the way they carefully balance the odds in their favor. How does PRED’s alternative model of charging fees for order matching change the user experience and enhance long-term engagement?
The fee model isn't a marketing line; it's the actual mechanism. The exchange charges a fee when two users match a position. We don't care which side wins. We care that volume happens.
For the user, this changes the experience in a few practical ways. Spreads are tighter because they're set by competition between traders rather than by an operator pricing in a margin. Pricing is more accurate because anyone with a sharper view can post a better quote and capture the spread. Limits aren't a defensive tool because we don't lose money to good traders.
Long-term, this matters because the user can build a track record without being shut down. That's the part most people coming from sportsbooks haven't experienced. You actually get to keep playing the game you got good at.
5: Traditional sportsbooks are notorious for banning successful bettors or, at best, limiting them. But you’ve publicly stated that PRED won’t do this, claiming that they’re the platform’s most valuable users. How does the peer-to-peer model help pro traders become an asset and help to grow your platform?
In a sportsbook, a winning bettor is a liability. The operator paid them, and the operator's profit comes from losing bettors, so winners get throttled. Limits, account closures, and slow pay are all standard.
On an exchange, a winning trader is a counterparty. They're the person taking the other side of someone else's losing trade. The exchange doesn't pay them; another user does. So the more accurate the trader is, the more useful they are to the platform, because their pricing pulls the rest of the market toward fair value and gives less experienced traders something real to trade against.
Sharp traders bring three things. Liquidity, because they post quotes. Price discovery, because their quotes incorporate information faster. And volume, because they trade more often than recreational users. We want them on the exchange, posting quotes, taking flow, building positions. That's the engine.
The position we've taken publicly is straightforward. Winners are welcome here. We don't limit accounts for being good, we don't close accounts, and we don't have a book to protect.
6: PRED enables its users to earn yield on capital sitting in their accounts on the platform. Why did PRED introduce this feature, and what impact will it have on your users?
Capital sitting in your account shouldn't sit dead. Most exchange users carry balances between trades, and on a traditional sportsbook, that balance earns nothing. We pass yield through on total net worth, whether it's idle cash or capital tied up in open positions, so users earn on everything they hold on the platform.
This isn't a separate yield product. It's a feature of the exchange, the same way a brokerage pays interest on your cash balance.
7: You say PRED is best suited for those who approach sports with the same analytical discipline as financial market traders. Do you envision sports trading becoming a legitimate form of investment, similar to something like options trading, instead of a casual hobby?
I'd push back on the binary in the question. You don't need to call something an investment to take it seriously, and you don't need to call something a hobby to enjoy it. People play poker professionally and recreationally on the same platforms. The same is true here.
What's changing is the infrastructure. Order book exchanges, transparent pricing, real spreads, no house. That's the toolkit a serious analytical trader needs to do work that compounds. You can build a model, post quotes, run a position, see your PnL, and iterate. None of that has been available for sports outcomes at any scale until recently.
Whether sports trading becomes a category like options trading depends on how the analytical layer develops around it. Options got serious when the math, the data, and the execution all matured. Sports trading is earlier on that curve. PRED’s role is to be the venue that makes the analytical work possible. That's the part we control.
8: How will PRED evolve on the social side? Is there potential for things like copy trading and community-based liquidity pools that will allow users to bet on the expertise of top traders? How will PRED approach this?
The social layer is something we're thinking about carefully rather than building publicly. An exchange where positions are visible has an obvious social product surface area. Friends see each other's positions during a live match. Group leaderboards. Markets that develop their own communities of traders. Mechanisms for users who want exposure to a strategy without running the model themselves.
Whether and how each of those gets built is a product decision the team will make over time. I'd rather not commit to specifics from the marketing side. What I'll say directionally is that an exchange is a multiplayer product by design. Every trade has another trader on the other side. Building social layers on top of that core is a natural extension, and we'll have more to share as those decisions get made.
Conclusion: A New Asset Class for the Digital Age
Mahensaria is building a future where sportsbooks won’t be welcome. It’s the dawn of a new era, in which sports outcomes are priced with the same mathematical precision as options and futures markets, and it will shift the category from a “vice” to a legitimate financial asset class.
Bettors won’t be bettors anymore – instead, they’ll be traders, leveraging their knowledge, sub-second execution, and a platform that actually wants them on it. Because PRED earns from volume rather than users’ losses, their incentives are aligned. The result is a global, open market that enables capital to be productive and skills to be rewarded.
As decentralized platforms like PRED mature and successful punters get the rewards they deserve, it’s hard to imagine there’ll be much runway left for the opaque bookmakers of today.
