Meet The Prediction Market CEO Betting on Democrats Ending Prediction Markets

The prediction markets industry has spent much of 2026 celebrating its explosive growth, but one CEO is betting that the political backlash against that success could end up bringing down its biggest players.

After Democrats swept control of the House and the Senate in Tuesday's midterm elections, at least the first part of his parlay just hit.

As the name of his prediction platform suggests, SafeBets founder and CEO Alex Konanykhin is building a different take on prediction markets. In a new interview with Coinage's Market Signal, he warns Democrats could soon unleash a wave of investigations and regulatory scrutiny against prediction market giants Polymarket and Kalshi.

"I firmly believe that they, Polymarket and Kalshi, are on the countdown to an implosion," Konanykhin said, pointing out that Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor for both. "What used to be political cover is going to become a huge liability."

Some of Konanykhin's warning was starting to come true even before Democrats swept election night. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed criminal charges against Kalshi in March, accusing the company of operating an illegal gambling business and accepting prohibited election wagers. Utah's Attorney General followed suit last month with another case. Kalshi has disputed those allegations and argued that its federally regulated contracts fall under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's jurisdiction. In May, U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi blocked Arizona's prosecution for that reason.

Instead, SafeBets is trying to build a prediction market that is less dependent on pitting traders against each other in binary outcomes. As Konanykhin explains, he was more interested in creating incentives to find signal from top predictors.

"The business which is based on making most of the absolute majority of its users lose money is not sustainable in the long term," he said.

Rather than requiring participants to wager money on event outcomes, SafeBets offers free predictions and financially rewards users who consistently make accurate forecasts. In a model that seems similar to how Robinhood revolutionized trading by offering zero-fee trades that fueled the growth of so-called "payment for order flow," SafeBets plans to monetize that "collective intelligence" by aggregating predictions from its most successful users and using that information to trade in traditional financial markets.

The theory is that financial markets offer a much larger potential revenue opportunity than prediction-market wagering alone. Rather than extracting money from losing participants, SafeBets would attempt to monetize the accuracy of the crowd.

Can SafeBets Win If Polymarket and Kalshi Lose?

Konanykhin's ambitions extend well beyond simply surviving a potential regulatory crackdown.

The founder, who previously helped build a major Russian banking business before seeking political asylum after Putin's rise to power, wants SafeBets to reach 250 million users by 2030. It's an ambitious growth target for a platform that only launched in April, but Konanykhin is betting another element might help kickstart growth.

SafeBets is building its community on the back of Unicoin, a cryptocurrency project Konanykhin also co-founded in 2022. The idea is that the platform will leverage the token as an element to reward predictors, and align interests between SafeBets and its users in a similar way to how Hyperliquid used its token to scale a community of traders. Konanykhin admits that anti-crypto positioning by the Biden administration came at a cost to his business as Gary Gensler's SEC targeted the company for "unregistered offers."

"Unfortunately, the previous administration decided to destroy or at least suppress the American crypto industry and they made us a focal point of that notorious war on crypto," he said. "But we withstood that war, we recovered, we deployed a new strategy and now we are working towards making Unicoin the leading cryptocurrency in the world."

For now, Konanykhin has been right about the direction of the political pendulum. Whether that translates into Kalshi or Polymarket bearing the brunt of the force from regulators is a much bigger question. But with Democrats preparing to take control of Congress, his contrarian bet on the future of prediction markets suddenly looks less far-fetched than it might have just a few weeks ago.

"I looked at the situation and I saw high demand for prediction activity, and at the same time, it was clear to me that the current business model based on gambling is a road to nowhere, or rather a road to implosion," he said.

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