In short
Episode topic: Galaxy Brains interviews Gil Wassermann (head of Prediction Markets at Galaxy) about standing up Galaxy’s new prediction markets desk, a recent $10M OTC prediction-market trade with ARCA tied to the “Clarity Act,” and how institutional prediction-market hedging could evolve (event-space vs outcome-space, ISDA-style credit/collateral, oracle/settlement). The episode also includes Bimnet Abibi discussing “summer doldrums” in markets and Bitcoin’s near-term setup.
Guests and backgrounds
Gil Wassermann leads prediction markets at Galaxy Trading; he discusses structuring OTC derivatives using listed-equivalent contracts and hedging outcome risk via traditional markets. Bimnet Abibi is from Galaxy Trading and covers macro/markets (rates, positioning, gold/FX, Bitcoin cycles).
Key claims
Institutional clients use prediction markets for downside hedges; Galaxy can provide bespoke hedging while relying on Calci for event determination. Prediction markets can transmit event risk into traditional outcome markets. Market doldrums reflect saturated AI sentiment, heavy issuance, stretched positioning, weak catalysts, and tighter real-yield/dollar conditions.
Notable examples
$10M OTC trade with ARCA on whether the Clarity Act passes before year-end; discussion of sports/event hedging (advertisers/merch tied to NBA finals/World Series) and oracle-trust challenges; mention of prior “mention markets” manipulation/insider-information edge cases (e.g., timing events like anthem length).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOMarket Overview with Bimnet Abibi
0:45 to 1:21
Discussion of current market conditions and trends affecting equities and Bitcoin.
“what the institutionalization of Prediction Market trading might look like, and where Galaxy fits in.”
Analyzing Economic Models and Capital Flow
1:21 to 2:24
Exploration of the economic factors influencing market doldrums and capital issuance.
“Let's go now to our friend BIMNet Abibi from Galaxy Trading.”
Positioning and Risk in Current Markets
2:24 to 3:46
Examination of market positioning and risk levels among hedge funds and institutions.
“And at the same time that there's some doubts over the economic models, you've had a historic amount of issuance where, one, there was the SpaceX IPO.”
Catalysts and Future Market Predictions
3:46 to 5:50
Discussion on the lack of positive catalysts and their impact on market momentum.
“If you look at some of the prime brokerage data, gross positioning is well north of the 90th percentile.”
Gold and Bitcoin's Market Dynamics
5:50 to 8:10
Insights on the challenges facing gold and Bitcoin amidst current market conditions.
“And at the same time, the monetary backdrop isn't as easy as it was a couple months ago.”
The Bitcoin Story and MicroStrategy's Impact
8:10 to 10:40
Analysis of the implications of MicroStrategy's trading strategy on Bitcoin's market.
“like, back to the pre-rally, like, to its.”
Market Sentiment and Future Outlook for Bitcoin
10:40 to 14:03
Discussion on market sentiment towards Bitcoin and potential future movements.
“But anyway, moving back to kind of the Bitcoin story, you know, I think all eyes are kind of on MicroStrategy, you know, stretches trading almost at$80.”
Current State of the Bitcoin Market
14:03 to 15:08
Explore the lack of selling pressure and buyer interest in Bitcoin.
“Like they've got to rip the Band-Aid off.”
The $10 Million Prediction Market Trade
15:17 to 17:08
Discover the details behind a major prediction market trade related to the Clarity Act.
“You structured a$10 million trade, a prediction market trade, over the counter with ARCA, a crypto fund, relating to the likelihood that the Clarity Act would or would not become law before the end of the year.”
Understanding OTC Trades vs. Listed Markets
17:09 to 19:16
Dive into the differences between OTC trades and trading on platforms like Polymarket.
“And what's interesting is we are seeing more and more institutional use cases for this.”
Show all 23 chapters
The Importance of Event and Outcome Space
19:17 to 21:30
Learn about the distinction between event space and outcome space in financial markets.
“in a bilateral contract with each other.”
Bespoke Contracts and Their Requirements
21:31 to 23:58
Examine the conditions for bespoke contracts and the importance of listed equivalents.
“I mean I also – But that's – and that's our business though, right?”
Prediction Markets: A New Frontier for Corporations
23:59 to 28:00
Discuss the potential of prediction markets for corporate risk management.
“Were these not being done over the counter at other places then?”
The Debate on Event Contracts in Sports
28:00 to 29:08
Discussing the complexities of event contracts and their implications in sports.
“and covered under the Commodity and Exchange Act, which is the authorizing statute of the CFTC.”
Oracles and Trust in Prediction Markets
29:08 to 30:20
Exploring the role of oracles in prediction markets and their implications for trust.
“But the thing that I think is really interesting, and I think it highlights what is a little bit difficult about other contracts that exist that can only be thought of as event contracts.”
Centralized vs Decentralized Mechanisms
30:20 to 31:28
Analyzing the potential futures of centralized and decentralized prediction market mechanisms.
“There's kind of two ways that people have approached this within prediction markets.”
Market Manipulation and Insider Trading
31:28 to 34:24
Discussing the risks of market manipulation and insider trading in prediction markets.
“This is going to be something that's useful.”
Information and Prediction Markets
34:24 to 35:56
Delving into the philosophical questions around information sharing in prediction markets.
“Now if they say them, they're manipulating a market that they have no involvement in?”
Real-World Examples of Prediction Markets
35:56 to 37:14
Examining various real-world cases and their implications for prediction markets.
“Yeah, there was another example that's not mentioned markets.”
The Future of Prediction Markets in Finance
37:14 to 39:46
Speculating on the future integration of prediction markets in traditional finance.
“And you do deal with these questions a lot.”
Trading Strategies in Prediction Markets
39:46 to 42:00
Discussing various strategies for engaging in prediction markets, including risk management.
“actually have a real tangible impact in those markets themselves.”
Exploring Principal Risk in Trading
42:00 to 44:22
Learn about the complexities of trading strategies that involve principal risk and derivatives.
“I mean, GDT, Galaxy Digital Trading, does take principal risk in its trading.”
The Future of Prediction Markets
44:22 to 44:43
Discuss the evolution of prediction markets and their relationship with derivatives.
“We're going to have to have you back on as the prediction market ecosystem develops further, which is definitely happening.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Alex Thorn:Welcome to Galaxy Brains.
0:25Alex Thorn:Welcome back to Galaxy Brains. As always, I'm your host, Alex Thorne, head of Firmwide Research at Galaxy. Bitcoin, not zero. We have a great episode for you this week. Gil Wasserman, head of Prediction Markets at Galaxy, is our guest. We're going to talk with Gil about the standing up of the new Prediction Markets desk at Galaxy, a big publicly announced trade that they did, what the institutionalization of Prediction Market trading might look like, and where Galaxy fits in. It's a very interesting interview with Gil. Also, we'll talk with our good friend, Bimnet Abibi. Galaxy Trading, as always, about markets.
0:57Alex Thorn:It is a very doldrums market. It's hot. It's the summer. Equities are off. Bitcoin is below 60K. And we'll find out from BIMNet why that is and where he thinks things are going. Before we get to any of that, I need to remind you to please refer to a link to the disclaimer in the podcast notes and note that none of the information in this podcast constitutes investment advice or an offer, recommendation, or solicitation by Galaxy or any of its affiliates to buy or sell any securities. Let's hop right into it with BIMNet Abibi. Let's go now to our friend BIMNet Abibi from Galaxy Trading. As always, BimNet, welcome to Galaxy Brands.
1:29Alex Thorn:Thanks for having me. Here we are. And I'm going to come out and call it the summer doldrums. We got rate hikes. Market is pricing now. Gold is below 4 ,000. Oil was supposed to moon. It's at 70. Bitcoin trading below 60K as we record. So basically at drawdown cycle low or near it, but firmly not bouncing, sort of dripping. Stocks, I don't know, flat today-ish, but been down. What's behind the doldrums in markets right now?
2:07Beimnet Abebe:It's a handful of things. I would say that the AI trade has kind of gotten a bit saturated on a local basis. There are some concerns about kind of the economic models, You know, headlines out about, you know, OpenAI reducing pricing, Microsoft looking at, you know, potentially offering, you know, DeepSeek, a bunch of corporates looking at their, you know, token expenses and trying to minimize that. And at the same time that there's some doubts over the economic models, you've had a historic amount of issuance where, one, there was the SpaceX IPO. But they also just raised, what, 25 yards? 25 billion in debt markets.
2:58Beimnet Abebe:Google had the 80 billion. Which is crazy, right? I don't even know what we call Google. It's hyperscaler. I mean, it's a late stage public company. Yes. But again, it's important. And they went from buying back a shit ton of shares to issuing more equity. At an ATM, right? Right. Yep. And Preferreds, NVIDIA also tapped the bond markets. SK Hynix came out today saying that they're going to issue equity. And so there is a ton of capital being drained from the market. To build the AI.
3:32Alex Thorn:Correct. And the data centers and the electricity and the whatever. And the RAM. And the GPUs.
3:37Beimnet Abebe:Yeah. And so I think that's dampened the market a little bit. It also comes at a time when positioning is very stretched. If you look at some of the prime brokerage data, gross positioning is well north of the 90th percentile. And net positioning... What does that mean? That people are longer than they've been? So the gross positioning combines longs and shorts. And so just the outright - But they're deployed. Deployed. Yeah, so not as much cash on the sidelines. It's been drained by trades. Yes. And so it just means that hedge funds are running a lot of risk and institutions are running a lot of risk.
4:23Beimnet Abebe:And then if you look at the nets for semis, they're very high. um if you look at the inflow figures into uh the popular you know semiconductor um etfs some of the levered etfs they're very high um i think a couple of them had record inflows um last week and so um you know positioning is quite elevated at this time when you know you've got a ton of issuance and some parts of the economic kind of thesis cracking and so that's weighed on equities a little bit. But what I also think is weight on equities is the lack of any meaningful positive catalysts in the near term. And so, you know, you had the signing of the, you know, memorandum of understanding, you know, oil's gotten back to - Yeah.
5:15Beimnet Abebe:And the oil's gotten back to pre-war levels. And so there isn't much in the way of like a headline that could come out that's going to send, you know, NASDAQ 3 % higher anymore. So it feels like a tape that lacks a positive catalyst. And then what I've seen from large dealers is that there's supposed to be a ton of equity selling for quarter-end rebalancing. And so you've got this setup where the fundamentals have kind of turned a little bit. Positioning is very elevated. You've had technical breakdowns in a lot of places, and the flows aren't looking good. And at the same time, the monetary backdrop isn't as easy as it was a couple months ago.
5:59Beimnet Abebe:You have a high expectations. It should be tightening potentially. We could be. I don't think we will as much as the market is currently pricing. I think if you look at what Lagarde said a couple days ago, effectively, you know, the fact that oil is down a ton. Should help inflation. Should help inflation. And if you believe Warsh that he wants to use more real-time metrics and not kind of the, you know, what the metrics that the Fed has historically been using, he wants to go more real-time, then I think you could make the case that, you know, hawkish expectations are a little bit too aggressive in the U.S.
6:40Beimnet Abebe:market. But notwithstanding, like, he definitely tightened financial conditions. by coming off as hawkish as he did. And then if you really think about what's been happening, effectively nominal yields have gone up because the Fed was hawkish and inflation expectations have been coming down because oil's been moving lower. And so you have this dynamic where real yields, which are nominal yields minus expected inflation, have been largely trending higher. And so if you're getting paid like a ton of interest over inflation, like what's your kind of like incentive to hold something like gold? Right.
7:21Beimnet Abebe:And, you know, your incentive to hold dollars is actually really high now. So the dollar has gone very, you know, big. That's why, yeah. Right. You've had euro, you know, traded to 113 handle, you know, EM currencies. These dollars done great against some EM pairs, but generally dollars are bid. And so you've got an environment that's generally very bad for gold where dollars are rallying as well as real yields moving higher. And you've had a technical breakdown there as well. And some of the central bank flow has been selling. I think Turkey recently sold a bunch of gold.
7:58Alex Thorn:The gold story is crazy. I mean, we're down 20 plus percent from all time high now. If you look at the chart, it does, like, I mean. It looks like almost every buyer this year is underwater. Yeah, and it looks like it could go all the way back to, like, 3K, like, back to the pre-rally, like, to its. It could. I probably won't. I mean, I don't know. I'm not an expert in this. I mean, just looking at the chart, crypto traders would be like, oh, here's where this is.
8:24Beimnet Abebe:I mean, I think there's a reasonable chance that both, you know, Bitcoin, I'm sorry, both silver and gold can trade back to close to the 200-week moving averages, which are much lower than here. But long story short, the market seemingly looks a little exhausted.
8:44Alex Thorn:Exhausted is a good way of saying it because the catalyst has been the AI build-out. Meanwhile, you've got mythos and fable blocked by the government. Yeah, that's also challenging the economic. It is in my mind because the way that Commerce has set up this test, it's unmeetable, right? They said that if Anthropic changes the code to make it impossible to jailbreak the model, that's impossible. And so it starts to wonder, like, can a new model ever come out under this standard? I don't think under this standard it can. So I'm wondering how we get through that. What is the way through this dispute here?
9:28Alex Thorn:Yeah. But that also should weigh on the build-out. But even without that, we've been, as a market, bullish on the AI build-out now for quite a long time. It's like how much longer can we literally just – you literally become exhausted. You need something new.
9:47Beimnet Abebe:Yeah, you need – here's the thing. Like, you know, if you talk to a lot of equity bulls this year, you know, who have been right, you know, they'll say like, well, companies earnings more like look at the earnings growth. And the flip side to it now is that you've had a re-rate of companies where, you know, the multiples have increased.
10:05Alex Thorn:Yeah.
10:06Beimnet Abebe:Right. And so, yeah, the earnings have been good. But you could make a case that, you know, the market has properly reflected that already.
10:13Alex Thorn:Right. Like you've already run well. Yeah. In which case, from a pure momentum standpoint, it's normal to have rallies and cool downs and rallies and cool downs.
10:22Beimnet Abebe:Yeah, absolutely.
10:22Alex Thorn:I mean, a lot of this is just sort of the sentiment we see in the market here. You could imagine in a month or two just – because we had one of these in the winter. Yeah. Or the deep seek freakout. Yeah.
10:34Beimnet Abebe:This feels more orderly.
10:36Alex Thorn:Yeah, it feels sort of like we're just tired. It's summer. It's hot. Yeah.
10:39Beimnet Abebe:We just need to take a breather. We're just a little tired. Yeah. Like I am a little tired.
10:42Alex Thorn:You look a little tired.
10:44Beimnet Abebe:But anyway, moving back to kind of the Bitcoin story, you know, I think all eyes are kind of on MicroStrategy, you know, stretches trading almost at$80. I saw that. And, you know, there's not really like a clear way for the, you know, MSCR reflexive cycle to begin again. Right. And it's going to come at the expense of something. it's either going to come at the expense of more Bitcoin selling or more MSTR selling.
11:16Alex Thorn:Yeah, it's basically more reneging on stretch. Yes. There's no good outcome for owners of MicroStrategy capital. And I've seen market commentators get increasingly agitated about this. There was a story, I think, in Bloomberg today, basically quoting people calling on Michael Saylor to stop buying Bitcoin. Anyway, people are very worked up about this strategy situation here.
11:44Beimnet Abebe:Yeah, and I think it's entirely appropriate because it really started when he used$1.5 billion worth of stretch proceeds to the converts. Which he didn't have to do. He did not. And so there was a mistake made, and Bitcoin's paying the price. And so are MSTR shareholders, and so are stretch shareholders. Yeah. But this, still at 59, this is where you expected us to go.
12:15Alex Thorn:No, absolutely. It just may so happen that at the moment some of the weight is being pushed by strategy. Yeah. But this is in line with what we've been saying. No, absolutely.
12:26Beimnet Abebe:And, you know, I think this is a market that without, you know, clarity is a potential catalyst. Yeah. I don't know how much higher it could take you. But that's the only thing that could feasibly take you reasonably higher at the moment. But absent clarity, the cycle thesis still holds. And you've done a lot of great work kind of analyzing all the similarities to past cycles in terms of the on-chain metrics, the holder base, et cetera. The timing is uncanny.
12:59Alex Thorn:Uncanny. Don't know how to account for that in my mental model, but it's empirically true. Empirical. And like I'm a believer in it and I keep it kind of simple.
13:08Beimnet Abebe:Yeah. Like we bought them in like October, late September. That's your prediction, yeah. And I think we go below 50K at some point. And at that point, once you're in October and you're at like really low levels, I think you got to take a stab at this.
13:24Alex Thorn:Yeah. I mean I think we have been very clear that it's not the end of the Bitcoin story. No, absolutely not. Well, and yeah, the funny thing is too now, the last two times we went to 60 in February, then a couple of weeks ago, it was a bit more violent dip to 60 and then a rebound. Today in particular, it's really just a borderly bleed. It's like a large T-WOP going through. It does. It looks like it. And you have to wonder though, and I think this is the other reason people are focusing so much on strategy. Who is left to sell Bitcoin? All the tourists have sold. I think that's pretty clear. But we know that strategy has a pile and they appear to need cash.
14:02Alex Thorn:So I think people are wondering whether they are selling or some have even said that they need to basically sell for the cycle to bottom. Like they've got to rip the Band-Aid off. I've seen some commentators say. I think that's feasible. I don't know if that's true. I think it's feasible.
14:16Beimnet Abebe:I think there's a lack of buyers as well. 100%. If the seller's not selling, you're right. Like a lot of the tourists have already sold. Right.
14:25Alex Thorn:So, I mean, it can still obviously go lower. And, you know, you've called for lower. The report that I put out suggested that the base case probably is lower. But at the same time, like, I look at this market right now and I don't see anyone who's planning to sell Bitcoin having not already done it really yet. So that's why it feels it's very anemic and like an apathetic market in Bitcoin. There's for sure a lack of interest in the broader market in Bitcoin at the moment. But I also don't see a lot of panic, you know. So I feel like that's sort of just where we find ourselves.
15:01Beimnet Abebe:Yeah, just how the cookie crumbles.
15:03Alex Thorn:Well, my friend Bimnet Abibi from Galaxy Trading, as always, thank you so much.
Read the full transcript
15:07Beimnet Abebe:Thanks for having me.
15:09Alex Thorn:Let's go now to our guest, Gilbert Wasserman, head of prediction markets at Galaxy Trading. Gil, welcome to Galaxy Brains. Hey, how's it going? Happy to be here. So you guys were in the news recently. You structured a$10 million trade, a prediction market trade, over the counter with ARCA, a crypto fund, relating to the likelihood that the Clarity Act would or would not become law before the end of the year. What was that? Tell me about that story. What did you do? Sure, yeah. I'll take you through it. So basically, ARCA came to us. They said, we believe that Clarity is going to pass, and we're going to position our book in such a way where we should benefit if it does.
15:50However, we're thinking about what is the appropriate hedge vehicle here. And they looked in options markets. They looked kind of around at potential proxies that they could use to hedge and looked at prediction markets and thought, you know what, this actually is probably like the best way to, you know, protect our portfolio to the downside. So we, so, you know, they came to us, we structured the trade, we transacted OTC and yeah. And now we're now in the trade.
16:19Alex Thorn:So they're a crypto fund. They're long, I don't know what's in their book exactly, but they're long crypto stuff and they want to buy downside protection basically. Yeah. So, I mean, for any prediction market trade, you can either buy or sell yes or no. And hypothetically buying yes is the same as selling no. So it gets a little bit complicated sometimes. But they wanted to buy no. The clarity will not become law because they feel that if it doesn't become law, that would negatively impact their crypto portfolio. So they want to own it as a hedge, basically. Yeah, exactly. It basically means that if Clarity does not pass, then their other portfolio is potentially going to suffer as a result of that.
16:58That's what they think. That's what they think. And then they get a bag of cash, which in this case is$10 million, if it does not pass. And so, yeah. And so that's why it's kind of being used as a hedge in that way. And what's interesting is we are seeing more and more institutional use cases for this. And what's kind of especially interesting is that they tend to be pretty inventive in the way that, you know, people are trying to use prediction markets at an institutional scale to structure these trades. And that's kind of where we come in.
17:28Alex Thorn:That's an interesting point because I've got plenty of follow-ups here. I guess let me start with why not just trade that on Polymarket, ARCA? Yeah, absolutely. So there's – you could certainly trade on Polymarket. There is a market. I follow that occasionally. Yeah, there's absolutely – so this was referencing a Calci contract. But there's a couple parts to that. If you do it on Polymarket, you have to have – it's a DeFi infrastructure. Like you have to have an address there. True, true. Potentially that could be tracked. That is not the same on Calci. And one of the things we could have done is we could have printed that trade as a block trade on Calci, which effectively would have been the exact same risk transfer to a certain extent.
18:07This one happened to have been done OTC. There's a number of reasons why people prefer OTC versus doing an enlisted market. But when we say OTC, I feel like OTC is kind of a misnomer a little bit in prediction markets. OTC, over the counter. A lot of the people that I talk to think that that just means block trading, a.k.a. you and I agree to a trade and a price and trade details, and then we just block it on exchange. But in that construct, both of us are actually facing the exchange from a credit risk perspective.
18:38Alex Thorn:I see. We're just agreeing to the trade and then we're funneling it through the exchange's pipes if we do it that way. Exactly. What this is is an OTC trade where it is our credit versus our counterparty's credit and that mechanism is governed by a traditional ISDA contract. And what's cool about that is we can offer this service kind of out of the box effectively, where if you have NISDA with Galaxy, you can just, you know, this is part of the suite of products you can trade immediately. Like other derivatives as well, basically. Yeah, I mean, you know, any sort of derivative transaction. So we're just taking each other's, ARCA and Galaxy are just taking each other's credit in a bilateral contract with each other.
19:21Alex Thorn:And if it goes one way, the other party is contractually obligated to pay. And if it goes the other way, the other party pays the other, right? Yeah, so basically the counterparty posts IA or initial amount, which in this case is equal to the price traded at, times the number of contracts. And that stays with us, Galaxy. That's the collateral. So some collateral is posted. Yeah, exactly. And that's normal for any ISDA sort of trade, right? Oh, absolutely. That's like a requirement. That is a requirement. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you talked about the credit risk facing the exchange, the privacy potential or even the lack of, if it was polymarket, maybe you don't have the DeFi infrastructure to actually, but like, you know, I think the polymarket on Clarity Act into law this year, I don't remember the number, but we're talking like low millions in total contract volume.
20:13Alex Thorn:Is that also, I mean, 10 million, I think would be by far the biggest trade on that. I mean, for sure. I mean, when we did it on Calci, it was, I think there were like 2 million contracts traded at the time. So, you know, this trade that we did was five times the size of the total volume of the market. And from our perspective, we're the sell side in this case. We now need to find a way to hedge out this risk. And I think that's really what we're trying to do in our seat, which is there's a difference between event space and outcome space. Event space, does a thing happen or does it not? Outcome space, what is the reaction to that event either happening or not.
20:52And traditional finance and trad fi markets are all built on outcome space. And sometimes outcome space can be a little bit tricky. I mean, like, think about the reaction to the 2016 election. Think about, you know, is good news bad news for a CPI print? And the tough thing about this is that a lot of institutional, you know, players actually care about the event itself, but are forced to transact in outcome space. And And what we're effectively doing is a risk transfer. We're going to give you the event space. We are going to hedge ourselves.
21:25Alex Thorn:We'll handle the outcome side. We're going to handle the outcome side. And what we – and kind of our specialty is the fact that we have an ability to be pretty sophisticated in what we can do with the hedges on the outcome side. I mean I also – But that's – and that's our business though, right? Whatever we want. That's principle on your side, right? Yeah, we take it down principle. You can hedge however you want. Not hedge? Whatever you want, right? Absolutely. And that's nice because for the counterparty because they can come with like really bespoke – the other thing I want to talk – this is connected.
21:56Alex Thorn:They can come with a very bespoke question. They could say I'm a soybean distributor and I want to buy like typhoons in South America, right, in case like my entire business is disrupted. I'll at least own some hedging there. And in the past, what do they have to do? Like short like Brazilian gas or something to – Sure. Some proxy, and now they can be much finer in detail, and they're basically saying, you know what, you, Gil, figure out how to cover yourself on that, right? Yeah, absolutely. There's one thing I would point out there, which is for bespoke contracts like that, there have been examples of those getting listed on CalShe to then be block traded.
22:34Alex Thorn:Interesting. And that's obviously super interesting. The thing I would say is we require for our OTC contracts to have a listed equivalent. So there has to be one somewhere. Yeah, and the reason that is is because, you know, we want someone else to make the final decision about whether an event occurred or not. I was going to ask about this. Yeah, so on the outcome, and I don't want to confuse it, on the – like the oracle. Yeah, the oracle, exactly. The event outcome. In this case, we – this contract relies on Calci's determination. Yeah, exactly. And we do not want to be the oracle. I was going to say, so that – would that at least forever?
23:10Alex Thorn:is it structural? Is it a business decision on our part right now that we don't want to ever offer one that's so bespoke it's not listed? Could we? I mean, is it possible or maybe it's impossible? I don't know. I mean, it is potentially possible, but we would also have to go through the process of setting up an Oracle ourselves. And I think that especially if you're doing something bilaterally, it's really great to have a third party to be able to do that. And also the other part of that is you also want to have a listed price. Like the counterparty is going to want to say like, hey, what is this thing worth right now?
23:43Alex Thorn:Right. Right. And if it's just like, okay, it's, you know, like 40 cents today and it's either going to be zero or a hundred, that doesn't really, it's difficult to think of that as a hedge if you can't observe the intermediate price. You know, there was in trade and some other ones like over the years, but in general, like pre poly market, pre Calci, there really weren't like listed prediction markets for event contracts. Were these not being done over the counter at other places then? Yeah, so that kind of fell under the umbrella of insurance more than anything. And you can go to Lloyd's of London and get whatever contract that you want.
24:17I see. And that was done there traditionally. And that's obviously great.
24:22Alex Thorn:It's another model for downside protection. Yeah, it's another model. And I mean, there's so much interesting stuff that you can do specifically from an insurance standpoint, I would say. where hypothetically, if someone who might not have access to the insurance markets needs to hedge a fundamental risk to their portfolio, one of the ways they can do that is via prediction markets and structure these sorts of trades. Yeah, that makes sense. So it has been done before the listed prediction markets existed, but now that they're here, it's what, much more possible? Yeah. I mean, so first of all, I would say the liquidity and price discovery is probably better.
25:00The other thing that I would say about that is, let's say you didn't want to go down the insurer. Let's say you didn't want some super bespoke product. Let's say that you thought that it was fine to hedge in outcome space as opposed to event space. You would need to achieve the sophistication that we kind of deal with on a daily basis. You need a complicated basket of stocks. You might need to think about options. And for a lot of people, they don't really want to spend their day thinking about their like Theta bill.
25:28Alex Thorn:Yeah. I do that all the time as a job. That's your day job. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so the idea there is that entire kind of headache of dealing with outcome space is effectively like stripped from the end user. And, you know, and it is our job to effectively, you know, manage principally the event risk and the outcome risk. So do you envision a lot more Galaxy counterparties coming to us for this type of trade? Yeah, I mean, we've seen a number of different trades come through us, be it on the geopolitical side, the economic side. So it is very interesting, the types of clients that we've seen here.
26:07What I'm also excited about is I do truly believe that the future of this industry is going to be with large-scale corporates in the world where they have very specific event risk that they need to hedge out. And I actually think that this is, in general, a huge positive for the market because you can make better business decisions if you know that you have an out somewhere. And I think that that's something that's really powerful that a lot of people haven't potentially considered. Just to give an example, and, you know, we're not transacting in sports space yet, but I think a good example is the following.
26:46Let's say that there is a, let's say that there's an advertiser who's sponsoring like a team. Well, I was about to say in the World Cup, but you know.
26:54Alex Thorn:Right. You know, it's where no advertisers there, just on the field. Yeah. You know, let's say. Like an NBA team. Yeah. Or the Knicks. You know, they just won the NBA finals. Yeah, absolutely. I forget who's on their jersey, but someone is. Someone, Abu Dhabi? I feel like there's this thing on the jersey. Yeah. Anyway, you know, let's say that they get a bonus for making it to the NBA finals. You know, that is – who knows what that – who knows what the present value of that is because that's so governed by the probability of them winning or not. So much better to be able to go hedge that in prediction market space and then go and like root for your team.
27:28Yeah. As opposed to being like, oh my god. Like they're about to win. Like I'm about to – I'm about to like write a – Make or lose a lot of money.
27:35Alex Thorn:Yeah. I'm about to write like a$50 million check. Yeah. Like let's – I've even thought – I know that like, you know, there's a lot of dispute obviously about sports. event markets because historically in the US, and it's not the same everywhere, but that's been considered gambling and it's been regulated at the state level, obviously. And we won't, I think the audience knows about this dispute. The CFTC chairman argues that their event contracts and covered under the Commodity and Exchange Act, which is the authorizing statute of the CFTC. There's literally lawsuits going on between the federal government and the states and between, I mean, I think Coinbase and Calci and the states, there's tons of them out there in the thing.
28:18Alex Thorn:And one of the arguments that the people who are opposed to allowing event contracts on sporting outcomes, one of the arguments they make is that it is gambling and that there's no – it's purely speculation that there's no utility. The argument you just made about the advertiser is a counter to that. I thought it's even simpler. Like you own a hot dog company in New York City and if the Knicks go far, you make a lot of money and if they don't, you make a lot less money. Or you're a t-shirt vendor. Like there's plenty of reasons like why you would hedge like a World Series or an NBA Finals outcome.
28:51Alex Thorn:I grew up in Boston. If the Red Sox do or don't make it to the playoffs, like that impacts businesses all over the state. Yeah, absolutely. And so I think it's totally reasonable, frankly, to think about them as events and not sports. I know that's a specific. There's much more to the prediction market conversation than the sports part. No, no. But the thing that I think is really interesting, and I think it highlights what is a little bit difficult about other contracts that exist that can only be thought of as event contracts. Right. Is that sports have a really good oracle. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
29:25You know what the score is at the end of the day. That settles. You know how many rebounds someone gets.
29:29Alex Thorn:It's even better too because they literally have referees on the field to help ensure that it goes fairly. Yeah, there is an arbiter of fairness that is there. On the television. Yeah, absolutely. And you can see all of it. The tough thing that I think is not standing in the way of like broader institutional adoption but is something that definitely needs to be solved over time is like how can you like trust the Oracle effectively? And especially when you get into contracts that aren't as cut and dry. Even like weather, you know, it will rain five inches. Well, which specific rain meter? Yeah, there was that.
30:03Alex Thorn:Was there a microclimate right around that meter that caused it to be more or less, even though the city saw fire? Sure. And to be clear, we also have this in traditional markets where there is a settlement-like reference rate for a lot of different assets. So that is firmly agreed upon, and that is where it will settle to. There's kind of two ways that people have approached this within prediction markets. And I actually don't know who the quote unquote winner will be. Either you can have a completely centralized, you know, board that just says this is yes or this is no. And if you don't like it, then then the courts are at your disposal to argue.
30:41Sue us. Sue us. Yeah. And like and we're and you know, that's part of that's part of life. Yeah. The other way you can do it is a decentralized mechanism. And that requires, you know, some voting and, you know, the appropriate like utility dynamics and stuff. and I actually don't know which one of those is going to eventually win out. The one that makes the most sense to me at the moment, I would say is closed door, black and white, yes or no. But I think that over time, this concept of almost like a decentralized mechanism with the right incentive structure could actually end up potentially being like the winner.
31:18Alex Thorn:If it could work, it's clearly better, but it's got a checkered history. You know what I'm saying? For sure. I mean, like, listen, as far as I'm concerned, I don't – right now, like, a lot of the conversations we're having in prediction markets are conditional upon this being massive in the future. This is going to be something that's useful. So as it stands right now, we're in the middle of, you know, navigating this, you know, difficult environment where it's like, okay, this might work at scale. But what happens, you know, as you accelerate to 100 miles per hour? Right. Like, how does the machine work at, like, 30?
31:52Yeah. So it's very cool and it definitely provides a lot of interesting opportunities, a lot of headaches for sure.
32:00Alex Thorn:Yeah. But it is exciting for sure. What about – have you thought about the various – I'm going to call it market manipulation problems. Sometimes some might – it's a big bucket here and it means several different things. We've written a lot about this on the research team. Insider trading in prediction markets or market manipulation. There was the U.S. soldier, the Navy SEAL, who traded on the—I don't remember if it was Polly or Kalshu, but traded on one of them about the Venezuela raid while, I think, either right before he was on the raid. There was an Israeli soldier, I think, two that knew of a forthcoming Israeli attack on, I think, Hezbollah and bet on that.
32:44Alex Thorn:These guys, in those instances, had private information, I'll even say. But they weren't the ones causing the event. to occur. There's others, like mentioned markets, where if you, let's say there's a market that says Gil's going to say, yep, in one minute. I would say there's layers to this, like inside knowledge versus actually the capability to cause the outcome to go in your favor and betting on it. In general, how is this different? Does this open a lot of doors? The CFTC has a request for comment right now that includes many questions about this, how it should be approaching that. Yeah, it is.
33:25So one of the things that definitely happens is, you know, people are required to identify themselves on a lot of these platforms. So you should be able to trace back quite easily, like who is going to, you know, is this person an insider or not? But I actually think that this is like a, for the mention marks to ensure if you are going to directly affect the outcome, that's kind of cut and dry to me.
33:46Alex Thorn:Yeah, but that one's also kind of like interesting because let's say I'm giving a speech. I mean, that's really dumb to be clear. These are small markets that have no real purpose, right? Right. But you open a market on whether or not I'm going to say X, Y, Z. I mean, it may matter if you're the president or CEO or something. Yeah. Talking about your company. But like if I'm giving a speech and you open a market that says, you know, Alex will say truth, Bitcoin, whatever. Now, because I'm aware of it, I'm now, you're infringing. I'm not able to say those words or I manipulate the market. Sure.
34:15Alex Thorn:That's like infringing on my First Amendment rights. Yeah, that is a really interesting question. That's a tricky one, yeah. That is a – Right? Yeah, I mean – You could just open a mention market for all of your enemies and all the words that you know they want to say. Now if they say them, they're manipulating a market that they have no involvement in? I mean, yeah. I think that it's going to require a constitutional lawyer to really get to the bottom of that one. Yeah. But I actually think the information question is actually really, really interesting. and you could argue, and this could be like a, you know, zero to a hundred and like we're at 30 right now problem, but you can imagine in a really, you know, in a really liquid deep market for a lot of these things, you know, you can think of price as being an indicator of, you know, information, like all the available information in the world.
35:03Alex Thorn:We'll call this information markets. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know. It's what Robin Hanson described. He said there is, the inventor of prediction markets, he said there is no such thing as insider trading in information markets. Well, yeah, that's kind of my point where hypothetically, if you have information, then you are not outsized relative to the total size of the market, the additional information that you have is actually probably good signal for the rest of the world. This is the purest position about prediction markets is that they incentivize people with information to effectively share it with the market to everyone's benefit.
35:39And from my perspective, I'm not really sure what the right decision is. But these are really deep philosophical questions about all this.
35:50Alex Thorn:I agree. And it's one of the cool things about the space and in dealing with a space that is so nascent. Yeah, there was another example that's not mentioned markets. It's not a soldier. There was a market on one of the prediction markets on how many seconds long would the national anthem be at the Super Bowl. And someone drove to the stadium and sat outside it for like the day or two before listening to them rehearse and timing the thing and then apparently profited on that market. Like is that unfair? Like is that inside information? Surely they had better information than someone who – I forget where it was, San Diego or wherever it was this year.
36:30Alex Thorn:Surely someone in Finland was unable to get that information. Sure. But it's not inside. They weren't the ones singing the anthem and they weren't even an employee of the Super Bowl halftime show or whatever. Yeah. They just had better information. Like I don't think that's – I think that's pretty clearly OK. That's like you just did better research. Or if you think about hedge funds, they buy satellite imagery of like oil tankers and they know where the oil is better than the average investor. Is that inside information? No. But it's interesting. There's – what I would say is like there is definitely a – there's definitely a spectrum there.
37:03And it's interesting to see, you know, any new asset class is going to have these, you know, edge cases. And the market is really good at kind of pushing people to an edge case.
37:13Alex Thorn:Yeah. And, you know, I think it's just fascinating to deal with. And you do deal with these questions a lot. Yeah, Mark Hochstein, the VP and editor at Galaxy Research, submitted a comment letter to the CFTC about this on our behalf. And, you know, we didn't go all the way to the purest position, but we behooved the commission to consider the value of information markets and that sort of purest idea when conducting rulemaking around these questions. So, again, I don't know where that line lands, but we do. Like if you rule out all knowledgeable parties from participating, then you actually relegate them to purely speculation, which degrades their value, right?
37:56Alex Thorn:And it makes them not the innovation that we know they've been. So somewhere – I don't know. It is tricky. They're going to have to figure this out. The other thing that I think is pretty interesting, and I think this kind of ties into what we're doing in prediction markets a little bit, is, again, with the idea of price being the total sum of knowledge, like efficient markets hypothesis. Yeah. You know, total sum of knowledge that exists in the world about a particular issue at a time. So right now, you know, a lot of people that I talk to use prediction markets as almost like a toy example.
38:27Beimnet Abebe:Right. A little bit. Like they use it to calibrate assumptions. Yeah. They use it to be like, okay, so you say that this trade has this expected value, but let's say that you mess with the other. Polymarket says this, though. Polymarket says this, and therefore that's wrong. That's what it's kind of being used for. It's kind of a toy example right now. So the two markets are very much disparate. One of the cool things about this is when we go and hedge out some of this event risk and outcome space, and we leverage either volatility trading in traditional markets or spot trading in traditional markets, like this sort of process in order to hedge out our risks, we are affecting prices in that market.
39:04So we kind of act as the transmission mechanism from event space into outcome space. And what's cool about that is it's kind of bringing prediction markets in general into the fold of markets writ large.
39:18Alex Thorn:Yeah, you're like the connective tissue between the event and the outcome in that spot. If you hedge it with stocks, for example, then some of that risk from the prediction, the event contract is effectively being expressed in stocks. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that as these institutional use cases increase, we are going to get to a point where the effect of hedging prediction markets in traditional markets is going to actually have a real tangible impact in those markets themselves. And that's going to be pretty cool. So do you think that we're going to start to see, by the way, this is sort of a tangential question, but like Fidelity, Schwab, E-Trade, are they going to start offering predictions market stuff?
40:01Alex Thorn:We haven't seen anything from the TradFi banks and brokerages in prediction markets. Really? Not really. So, yeah. And as a kind of like go around from this, we have seen a bunch of ETF providers seeking to offer those sorts of prediction markets packaged as like an ETF. Yeah. So that's something – and so that's kind of like a back way into it effectively. True, true. That's true. My guess is the platforms where you're going to be able to trade prediction markets are going to be numerous. I would – there are many, many platforms. I was going to say I think Interactive Brokers has had it for a long time actually.
40:38Alex Thorn:I know there were IB contracts on the presidential election in 2024. OK. Well, there we go. I mean – and also like Meta just came out saying that they were going to build a prediction market. So what I would say about this is I think that what's most important here is to try to separate the pure hype. We're just going to get into this space because it's like the hot new thing and I want a press release and like that sort of thing. And really try to take away the kind of important part. I think that our, I would say, strategy into this has been pretty measured. So, you know, we've been having a look at this for a call like the past like six, seven months.
41:21And from my perspective, there's kind of like three ways you can really make money in prediction markets. You can be the exchange itself. You can be a market maker on that exchange or you can take principal risk.
41:30Alex Thorn:Or you can be right. You can take bets. Yeah. Or trades. Yeah, you can do that. Exactly. You can do all that sort of stuff. And, you know, I think that a lot of people so far, I think that the exchanges and like the onscreen market makers kind of have that like sewn up, you know. And so I really felt that the third box, which is taking principal risk and, you know, being creative with hedging, et cetera, is something that kind of like fit very well into like the Galaxy KPIs of we have a big balance sheet and we know how to take principal risk. That's right. I mean, GDT, Galaxy Digital Trading, does take principal risk in its trading.
42:06Alex Thorn:And that's why it can facilitate like such large trades. For example, the ADK Bitcoin whale, you can't take that down with no – like on a pure agency basis. You can't – if you flood the market, the listed markets with 80 ,000 Bitcoin, see what happens, right? I mean and that's – and I think that that exact type of creativity that we start to like think about. Like I mean before Galaxy, I was trading like volatility relative value. And in that market, you know, if a client comes in and they say, hey, I want to buy this particular thing, your job is to say there is something I want to sell more in vol space against it.
42:40and this kind of creative hedging, et cetera, that has embedded principal risk is our bread and butter.
42:48Alex Thorn:That's the most interesting. It sounds like probably the most interesting desk, not just the new prediction markets desk, but just the volatility trading. This must be why all the vol traders I know are such clever people because it's an exciting thing to structure, right? It is exciting. Selling spots like, hey, man, you want to buy some Bitcoin? Like here it is, right? But like principal derivatives trading is a whole different ballgame. Yeah, absolutely. It's why my health has absolutely fallen off a cliff. Mental health as well. Shot. Come on. No, no, no. I'm just kidding. But like, you know, it is the ability to trade in derivatives or in event contracts.
43:26You are dealing in a higher dimensional space. And the reason that I actually really like this is that both sides can be winners. where if you're taking something down just one versus the other and there's no element of like a hedge, like it is a zero-sum game. One person is going to win, one person is going to lose. That is just how it's going to work. When you're dealing in across different dimensions, in derivatives with respect to Greeks, for example, or in event contracts with respect to I'm going to deal in outcome space as opposed to event space, in both of these states of the world, the client gets good liquidity.
43:59They get the trade that they want. in the size that they want. And from our side, we're also happy because we take in a certain amount of spread to put that on. We deploy that spread in traditional markets or across a volatility surface. And we manage that basis risk principally. And that's really the core of everything that we do. And it makes sense that the prediction market desk would come out of the derivatives desk.
44:26Alex Thorn:Yeah, it does. Well, this is super fascinating. We're going to have to have you back on as the prediction market ecosystem develops further, which is definitely happening. And congrats on that announcement and on the operation of this new desk, Gil. Thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brains. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
44:50Alex Thorn:Thank you for listening to Galaxy Brains, the weekly podcast from Galaxy Research. I'm Alex Thorne, head of firmwide research at Galaxy. Follow me on X at Intangible Coins. Follow Galaxy research on x at glxy research read our written reports at galaxy.com slash research and don't forget if you like galaxy brains to like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platforms like youtube spotify apple podcasts and more we'll see you next time
From the publisher
Alex Thorn talks with Gil Wassermann, Galaxy’s Head of Prediction Markets, about the institutional prediction markets use case, Galaxy’s new prediction markets desk, and why the world is crazy for prediction markets. Alex also talks with Beimnet Abebe about the summer doldrums in markets.
Galaxy conducts event contracts activity solely with eligible, institutional counterparties and evaluates offerings on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis in light of applicable legal and regulatory considerations.
Participants, along with Galaxy Digital, hold a financial interest in Bitcoin (BTC). Galaxy regularly engages in buying and selling BTC, including hedging transactions, for its own proprietary accounts and on behalf of its counterparties. Galaxy also provides services to vehicles that invest in BTC. If the value of such assets increases, those vehicles may benefit, and Galaxy’s service fees may increase accordingly. The valuation in this communication is based on technical, fundamental, and market analysis and not on any formal valuation method. For more information, please refer to Galaxy’s public filings and statements. Cryptocurrencies, including BTC, are inherently volatile and risky and ultimate market movements may not align with this statement.
For additional risks related to digital assets, please refer to the risk factors contained in filings Galaxy Digital Inc. makes with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) from time to time, including its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, available at www.sec.gov.
This episode was recorded on Wednesday, June 24, 2026.
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Follow us on Twitter, @glxyresearch, and read our research at www.galaxy.com/research/ to learn more! This podcast, and the information contained herein, has been provided to you by Galaxy Digital Holdings LP and its affiliates (“Galaxy Digital”) solely for informational purposes. View the full disclaimer at www.galaxy.com/disclaimer-galaxy-brains-podcast/

