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What's the Bermuda regulation giving in terms of advantage, do you think?

As in, the kind of person willing/able to use bitcoin for a prediction market isn't going to look favorable on a state government stamping it with its regulatory approval?

The biggest risk with operating a prediction market business is scrutiny from regulatory authorities, or being seen as a gambling platform and needing to operate under gambling regulation. Kalshi and Polymarket are both under regulatory scrutiny due to the vast majority of their volume coming from sports betting. If you look at the history of prediction markets, the vast majority of successful prediction market businesses were shut down by regulators.

In Bermuda, we are regulated under the DABA T-license, which is a financial services license, not gambling. If we want to enter into other markets that are gated by licenses (EU, Canada, USA, UK, etc) then we need to demonstrate our ability to act as a licensed derivatives exchange and custodian. It's a serious responsibility to act as a custodian of other people's money, so we handle that through a regulated approach, rather than trying to engineer a secure non-custodial protocol (which is orders of magnitude more challenging).

For Bitcoin to win in the long-run, it needs adoption from normal individual people, not just libertarian cypherpunk Bitcoin maxis. Our hypothesis (which we are testing) is that ordinary traders would be willing to trade in prediction markets built on Bitcoin, not just those who have been orange pilled. So far we are receiving more interest from Asia, which is what we expected. There's more speculative activity and trader interest, and less ideological barrier, compared to the West.

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