Pred Opens to Public as $5M Beta Volume Fuels World Cup Sports Trading Push

Beta Engagement and Performance Metrics

Pred, a peer-to-peer sports trading exchange built on the Base blockchain network, opened public access on June 4 following an eight-week private beta phase that generated $5 million in notional volume. The platform’s public debut is timed precisely for the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, utilizing the global soccer tournament as a launchpad to onboard mainstream sports bettors into Web3.

The move is much akin to how platforms utilized the excitement around the 2024 U.S. presidential election to drive mass adoption for general prediction markets.

“Big events bring people in, and the 2024 US election showed how fast that can happen,” Amit Mahensaria, CEO and co-founder of Pred, said. “But an election resolves once. You take a position, it settles, and there’s no reason to come back until the next cycle. The World Cup runs for a month. Every match, every session, every goal reprices the book in real time, and that builds a trading habit rather than a one-off.”

According to a media statement, during its invite-only beta phase, Pred saw engagement from more than 300 users who executed over 100,000 trades focused on soccer markets. According to internal data provided by the company, 86% of those beta traders remained active week over week, and 83% made repeat deposits.

Pred operates as a sports-native decentralized exchange, utilizing an onchain order book that allows traders to match positions directly against one another. The company claims a trading settlement speed of 200 milliseconds, with markets resolving in three minutes. All positions are denominated in the USDC stablecoin, settled onchain, and accrue native yield on deposits.

Mahensaria notes that for a crypto-native audience, the structural advantages of a decentralized framework address long-standing industry challenges. “Positions settle on-chain in USDC, funds stay in your wallet, and the order book is open to see,” he said. “That removes the trust gap that keeps a lot of people off online sports trading.”

Targeting Year-Round Sports Volume

A common challenge for event-driven betting platforms is a severe drop-off in user volume once a major tournament concludes. However, Mahensaria dismissed fears of a post-World Cup decline, pointing to the continuous nature of the global sports calendar.

“Sports don’t have a post-event cliff,” Mahensaria said. “The World Cup ends and the domestic leagues are already back. Premier League, La Liga, the Champions League, the NBA season. There’s always a match, so there’s always volume.”

The exchange is positioning itself against traditional sportsbooks and broader, general-purpose prediction markets by focusing on specialized micro-markets. These include 15-minute in-game markets that settle during live play, “1UP” and “2UP” markets that close immediately when a specific goal differential is met, and live moneyline markets.

Mahensaria emphasized that these formats translate seamlessly to year-round league play. “The markets that perform during the tournament—15-minute markets, live moneyline, session markets—aren’t World Cup specific. They run daily across every league, so the engagement you build in June and July has somewhere to go in August.”

Unlike traditional sportsbooks that rely on internal market makers to take the other side of a wager, Pred’s peer-to-peer model matches traders directly against one another. This structural difference alters how the platform manages liquidity, especially during lower-profile group-stage matches.

“A two-sided market doesn’t need a house, it needs liquidity from independent participants quoting both sides,” Mahensaria explained. “The structural point is what we don’t do: we never take a position against our own traders. The counterparty is another trader, never the platform, so there’s no conflict between us and the people trading on the book.”

To ensure niche in-game events remain viable on thinner books, the platform relies on market pricing mechanisms rather than centralized intervention. “A thin book carries a wider spread, and a wider spread is what makes that market worth quoting for a liquidity provider,” Mahensaria said. “ Liquidity is drawn to the opportunity rather than assigned by the platform. The model points liquidity to where traders actually want to trade, with the house never on either side of the trade.”

Mahensaria, who spent 22 years trading sports, stated that this model directly addresses the structural limitations and “exploitative pricing” that traditional sportsbooks impose on successful, sharp traders. “Pred is the exchange I wanted as a trader,” he said. “The UX and speed of a sportsbook, the pricing and transparency of an on-chain exchange.”

The public release features the platform’s V2 iteration, which developers rebuilt based on feedback from more than 300 user interviews during the beta phase. Pred is backed by venture capital firms Accel and Coinbase Ventures.