You’re watching a streamer break down tonight’s basketball game when you notice something new, a market tracking real-time odds on the outcome, right there in the app. Other viewers are already participating. The collective prediction shifts as someone mentions injury news in the chat. You can see the price move in real time as the information spreads through the community. The conversation and the market feed into each other, creating something that feels less like trading and more like thinking out loud with a few thousand other people who care about the same game.
The Wisdom of Crowds, Now With a Like Button
This is what MyPrize is building with Crypto.com. It’s not just another prediction market platform competing for traders’ attention. It’s an attempt to weave forecasting tools into spaces where people already gather, turning market participation into something that happens naturally alongside the streaming, gaming, and community interaction that already keeps over 1 million users coming back to the platform.
The concept draws on a well-established principle in economics called the wisdom of crowds. When James Surowiecki popularized this idea in his 2004 book, he showed that under the right conditions, groups make remarkably accurate predictions. Prediction markets take this concept and add financial stakes, creating what researchers have found to be surprisingly accurate forecasting tools. The Iowa Electronic Markets, operated by the University of Iowa since 1988, have consistently matched or outperformed traditional polling in predicting election outcomes, precisely because participants have incentives to be right rather than optimistic.
But here’s the catch that MyPrize is trying to solve, these markets have historically been inaccessible to most people. Complex interfaces, high barriers to entry, and designs built for professional traders meant prediction markets remained niche tools. MyPrize’s approach inverts this model entirely, starting with an existing community of over 1 million users and bringing markets to them, rather than building markets first and hoping communities form around them.
What’s Actually Being Built Here
The partnership structure reveals thoughtful attention to both regulation and user experience. Crypto.com Derivatives North America (CDNA), a CFTC-registered exchange and clearinghouse, provides the regulated infrastructure that allows MyPrize to offer these markets legally in the United States. This isn’t a small detail. Prediction markets have faced regulatory uncertainty for years, with some platforms operating in gray areas or limiting their offerings to stay compliant.
“After exploring the market, it quickly became obvious to us that Crypto.com has by far the market leading infrastructure for institutional and enterprise scale,”
said Zach Bruch, Founder and CEO of MyPrize.
“Together we will be able to deliver this first of its kind product offering to all of MyPrize’s users and onboard our billions in volume into the MyPrize Markets product.”
The division of labor matters: Crypto.com handles the complex regulatory compliance, exchange operations, and institutional-grade security. MyPrize controls what users actually see and interact with, designing the interface and integrating markets into its existing social gaming and livestreaming platform. This allows the company to maintain the user experience that attracted its current audience while adding an entirely new dimension to what the platform offers.
Travis McGhee, Managing Director and Global Head of Capital Markets at Crypto.com, described the partnership as part of a larger shift:
“We are seeing a massive change in how financial markets are converging with other products. We have been at the forefront of the convergence of crypto with TradFi. Now, we are at the forefront of a similar convergence with live social platforms and financial markets with our partner, MyPrize.”
The platform will offer markets across multiple categories, including sports outcomes, political events, cryptocurrency price movements, and other topics that engage MyPrize’s community. It will be accessible through both MyPrize.us for domestic users and MyPrize.com internationally, available on web and mobile devices.
The Distribution Advantage That Changes Everything
Understanding why this partnership matters requires recognizing what makes distribution so powerful in digital platforms. Most prediction market platforms face a fundamental challenge: they need to build an audience from scratch. Every user must discover the platform, create an account, learn how markets work, and decide to participate, all without the platform offering much beyond the markets themselves.
MyPrize flips this entirely. The platform already has over 1 million users who show up for social gaming and livestreaming. These users have existing habits, established communities, and reasons to open the app that have nothing to do with prediction markets. Now, those markets will simply be there, integrated into an experience users already value.
This matters more than it might seem. Consider how most people first encountered other financial tools that are now mainstream. Many people’s first stock purchase happened through Robinhood, not because they woke up deciding to become investors, but because the app made it frictionless and wove it into their existing digital habits. Similarly, MyPrize users might discover prediction markets not through a deliberate search, but because a streamer they follow mentions a market during a broadcast, or because they see community discussion about an upcoming event.
The social infrastructure also creates natural learning opportunities. In traditional prediction markets, new users must figure out how everything works largely on their own. In a social platform, users can watch how others participate, ask questions in real time, and see markets discussed in context. This scaffolding could significantly lower the learning curve that has historically limited prediction market adoption.
Bruch emphasized this integration:
“Together we will lean in and deliver fun and engaging experiences for our players and bring major enhancements to the social, livestreaming content, and community engagement that the MyPrize platform fosters.”
The goal is making markets feel like a natural extension of the platform’s existing social fabric rather than a separate financial product that happens to live in the same app.
What This Means for the Prediction Market Ecosystem
The broader prediction market landscape has been evolving rapidly. Platforms like Polymarket have demonstrated substantial appetite for prediction markets among crypto-native audiences. Kalshi has focused on regulatory compliance and traditional financial market participants. PredictIt carved out space in political forecasting before regulatory challenges limited its operations.
MyPrize’s entry point is distinct from all of these. Rather than targeting traders, crypto enthusiasts, or political junkies specifically, MyPrize is bringing prediction markets to people who came for entirely different reasons: entertainment, social connection, and gaming. This represents a different theory of adoption, one that doesn’t require convincing people that prediction markets are interesting, but rather makes markets available to people who are already engaged with the platform for other purposes.
The competitive implications extend beyond direct rivalry. If MyPrize successfully demonstrates that prediction markets can work for mainstream social platform users, it validates a model that other platforms will likely attempt to replicate. We could see prediction markets integrated into other social gaming platforms, livestreaming services, or even traditional social networks. The question isn’t whether MyPrize will monopolize this space, but whether they’re opening a door that many others will walk through.
Crypto.com’s participation also signals something about the maturation of prediction market infrastructure. The company’s existing partnerships with Formula 1, UFC, the UEFA Champions League, and its naming rights to the arena in Los Angeles demonstrate its capacity to operate consumer-facing products at scale. Their willingness to build infrastructure specifically for social platform integration suggests they see this as a growth category worth substantial investment.
The Regulatory Foundation That Makes This Possible
It’s worth pausing to appreciate how much the regulatory landscape has shifted to make a partnership like this possible. Just a few years ago, prediction markets in the United States existed primarily in academic settings or operated with significant constraints on what they could offer and how they could function.
The CFTC’s evolving approach to prediction markets, including clearer frameworks for how platforms can operate legally, has created space for innovation that didn’t exist previously. Crypto.com’s registration as both a designated contract market and derivatives clearing organization provides MyPrize with regulatory cover that would have been difficult or impossible to obtain independently.
This infrastructure matters for MyPrize’s growth trajectory. Operating with clear regulatory approval means the company can invest confidently in building out the platform, marketing to users, and expanding internationally through MyPrize.com without constantly looking over their shoulder at regulatory risk. It also means users can participate with greater confidence that the platform operates within legal boundaries.
The partnership structure itself reflects regulatory sophistication. By keeping the regulated exchange operations with Crypto.com while MyPrize focuses on user experience and community, both companies can operate in their areas of expertise while maintaining appropriate separation between different functions. This division will be important if regulators increase scrutiny of platforms that blend social features with financial instruments, an area where regulatory attention has been growing.
What Success Looks Like
The true test of MyPrize Markets won’t be whether it launches successfully or attracts initial users. It will be whether the platform can maintain market quality as it scales, whether users find the experience valuable enough to return regularly, and whether the integration of social and market features creates something genuinely new rather than just coexisting features in the same app.
Success would look like prediction markets that are both more accurate and more accessible than existing alternatives. Markets that incorporate information more quickly because they’re embedded in real-time social conversations. Users who discover forecasting as a natural extension of their existing platform habits. Creators who build content around market events, making the entire ecosystem more engaging.
Harnessing collective intelligence in the digital age
The MyPrize and Crypto.com partnership represents one of the more interesting experiments in how we might harness collective intelligence in the digital age. By combining prediction markets with social platforms, they’re testing whether forecasting tools can transition from specialized instruments used by professionals to everyday features that mainstream audiences engage with naturally.
The outcome matters beyond just these two companies or even the prediction market industry. If successful, this could demonstrate a model for how financial instruments and social platforms can integrate productively, creating value for users while maintaining market integrity. It could show that the wisdom of crowds works even better when those crowds are already gathered for other purposes, already communicating, already forming communities around shared interests.
The platform launches with meaningful advantages: regulatory clarity, existing user base, strong technical infrastructure, and a clear vision for what makes their approach distinct. The challenges they’ll face in balancing social engagement with market quality, in designing for accessibility without sacrificing functionality, and in managing the complex dynamics that emerge when finance meets social media are substantial but not insurmountable.
Perhaps most importantly, MyPrize Markets will generate real-world evidence about questions that have largely been theoretical until now. How do mainstream users interact with prediction markets when given accessible tools? How do social dynamics influence market prices? Can platforms design experiences that encourage informed participation rather than impulsive speculation? The answers will shape how prediction markets evolve and how other platforms think about similar integrations.
For users, this represents an opportunity to engage with forecasting tools that have historically been inaccessible, integrated into a platform they already value. For the industry, it’s a test case that will inform strategy for years to come. For anyone interested in how we aggregate information and make collective decisions in the digital age, it’s an experiment worth following closely as it unfolds.
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