With Amit Mahesaria: How PRED is Redefining Sports Predictions

Prediction markets are rapidly growing worldwide. Meanwhile, founders like Amit Mahensaria are bringing a different perspective. Amit’s idea is simple but revolutionary: operate sports predictions not as a traditional sportsbook, but as a decentralized exchange. This approach is the core concept behind PRED (a sports prediction exchange). Amit’s company focuses on this question: what if the interests of the players making predictions and the platform’s interests are fully aligned?

Exchange Model: Fundamental Differences from Traditional Sportsbooks

Understanding PRED hinges on its underlying architecture. In a traditional sportsbook, you bet against the house. The house sets the odds, takes the other side of your bet, and profits when you lose. This creates a structural conflict of interest, leading major sportsbooks worldwide to eventually restrict or limit their best customers.

PRED’s model is completely different. Here, users trade directly with each other. The platform simply connects buyers and sellers. According to Amit Mahensaria, PRED never takes the other side of a trade and never takes a directional position against its users. Revenue is straightforward: trading fees on matched orders. This means PRED makes money when people trade, not when they lose.

Unlike other prediction platforms like Polymarket or Kalshi, PRED is specifically tailored for sports. While general-purpose prediction markets derive most volume from sports, PRED is built from the ground up for sports trading. It includes advanced features like cross-matching, where liquidity automatically generates across all related outcomes of a single match. This specialized approach offers a significant differentiation from typical prediction markets.

Liquidity and Speed: Built on Base for Live Sports Markets

In live sports markets, timing is critical. A single second can shift the market by 30 or 40 percentage points. If a platform can’t keep pace, traders either miss opportunities or get filled at stale prices. Both scenarios erode trust.

Amit Mahensaria clarified that PRED executes trades in under 200 milliseconds. In comparison, most on-chain prediction platforms take several seconds to confirm a trade. Traditional sportsbooks are even slower during peak times as they adjust lines. This ultra-fast execution ensures that when you see a price on PRED, you can actually get it.

To enable this performance, PRED is built on Coinbase’s Layer 2 solution, Base. This technical choice was made for three reasons. First, transaction fees are fractions of a cent, essential for trading where gas costs could significantly cut into profits. Second, Base offers finality in under a few seconds, crucial for live sports markets. Third, the Base ecosystem is developing serious crypto applications, and these users understand DeFi tech that makes an exchange model feasible.

PRED’s architecture combines on-chain settlement with off-chain order matching. This hybrid provides the transparency of blockchain with the speed of a centralized exchange. The speed needed for live sports markets comes from here.

No Banning of Winners: How Incentive Alignment Builds Trust

The biggest concern in Web2 sportsbooks and Web3 prediction markets is simple: if you’re too good, you might get banned. PRED has taken a firm stance: winners will never be banned.

For Amit Mahensaria, this policy was personal. Having been active in sports trading for over 22 years, he repeatedly saw top analysts and traders banned—just because they were good at their craft. These professionals spend half their time on logistics: moving funds between accounts, involving friends and family, finding books that haven’t restricted them yet. It’s inefficient and frustrating.

Bookmakers restrict winners because of their structural incentives. When the house is your counterparty, every dollar you win is their loss. So they naturally ban those who cost them the most money. It’s logical within a broken model.

On an exchange, this incentive doesn’t exist. PRED doesn’t take the other side of your trades. According to Amit, the more skilled traders PRED attracts, the more volume they generate, the deeper the markets become, and the better the experience for everyone. Profitable traders are the most valuable users, not a burden. This is structurally possible because PRED cannot profit from your losses, so there’s no reason to penalize your success.

This policy wasn’t just a marketing decision—it’s a direct result of the exchange architecture. It reflects the market Amit has wanted to build from day one: a place where skill is rewarded, not punished.

Capital Efficiency and 5-6% Yield: Why This Is the Core User Experience

On traditional sportsbooks or most prediction platforms, you deposit funds and capital remains idle until you trade. If you’re waiting for the right market or price, your money isn’t working. Some platforms can keep deposits invested for days or weeks without trading.

PRED’s approach is different. Here, your deposited capital generates yield while in your account. PRED has partnered with institutions to earn returns on underlying stablecoins. Additionally, since PRED doesn’t have heavy marketing costs like deposit bonuses, it can return a portion of trading fees as income to users.

The result: even when you’re not actively trading, your capital is working for you. According to Amit, capital efficiency is something serious traders constantly think about. For professionals, the opportunity cost of idle capital is significant. The 5-6% intrinsic yield allows traders to keep large balances on PRED without feeling they’re sacrificing returns elsewhere.

This isn’t just a feature—it’s embedded in the core user experience. It reflects PRED’s philosophy: your money should work for you. It’s a simple principle, but almost no one in this industry follows it.

Amit’s Journey: How Investment Banking and EdTech Shaped PRED

To understand PRED, it’s important to grasp Amit Mahensaria’s professional background. His career started in investment banking, then moved into private equity, and later built a broad EdTech platform (Importus, later acquired by Upgrade).

Each phase taught him different lessons. Investment banking and private equity helped him understand how markets work, the structure of liquidity, and how incentives among participants can make markets flourish or collapse. It became clear that sustainable markets only operate when the interests of operators align with those of participants.

Building Importus (now under Upgrade), which reached two million users, taught Amit a different lesson: how to earn user and institutional trust over time. Instead of marketing and hype, success came from reliability, transparency, and consistent delivery. This long-term approach is directly reflected in PRED.

But beneath it all is 22 years of personal experience in sports trading. That’s where Amit personally felt what bans meant, how slow platforms were, the hassle of cashing out, and watching platform rules change. This frustration—and empathy for all serious traders—drives what PRED is today.

That’s why PRED isn’t just “a crypto product with a sports mode.” It’s built by someone who understands market infrastructure and the specific challenges of serious sports trading.

Trust, Behavior, and Long-Term Thinking

Many crypto products focus on short-term speculation. PRED emphasizes running a fair market rather than taking directional risk. Amit’s simple argument: when users trust that the platform isn’t working against them, their behavior fundamentally changes.

On traditional platforms, skilled traders develop anti-competitive habits. They spread activity across multiple accounts. They intentionally lose some trades to trigger algorithms. They keep low balances because they don’t trust the platform with large sums. All this reduces volume and harms the market for everyone.

On an exchange where rules are transparent and incentives aligned, traders can focus solely on their skill: analyzing games and taking positions. The logic is straightforward: if you’re good, why would you get banned? The biggest churn driver in sports trading is lack of trust. Remove that, and you build a community of committed, high-quality traders who generate consistent volume.

Moving Forward: Prioritizing Liquidity Depth

In the next 12-24 months, PRED’s success hinges on several factors, but if one must be prioritized: liquidity depth.

Amit’s clear view is that volume figures can be misleading. The real question is: can a trader come to PRED, find a market they want to trade, and fill it at competitive prices with genuine depth? That’s the core commitment.

In the near term, PRED isn’t chasing registration numbers. For Amit, a few thousand committed traders generating real, sustainable liquidity are better than millions of uncertain sign-ups. User quality, especially in early stages of an exchange, matters more than volume.

Expansion into new markets is fully on the roadmap. PRED has started with major leagues like the English Premier League, Champions League, La Liga, and will soon expand into other sports. Not only new sports but also diverse markets within the same sport or league, tailored to different user needs. Features like combined game predictions will enable new types of bets.

The bigger picture is about the state of prediction markets within Web3 finance. Amit believes we are still in a crucial phase: understanding sports outcomes as a genuinely analyzable, tradable asset class—not just entertainment.

PRED has raised $2.5 million led by Accel, with participation from Coinbase Ventures. This investment reflects confidence in this vision. Amit and his team are building for the long term, not just the next cycle.

Disclaimer: The content shared in this interview is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, investment recommendations, or endorsement of any project, protocol, or asset. Cryptocurrency involves risks and volatility. Readers should conduct independent research and consult qualified professionals before making any financial decisions.