Prediction markets are having a moment.
They’ve been called the fastest-growing corner of finance. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi are making headlines every week, and everyone from sports fans to political junkies is suddenly “trading” their opinions.
But this week’s guest is looking at the boom through a different lens: ethics.
On the latest episode of SheCrypto, Laura and I sat down with Gina Antoniello, a professor at NYU’s Tisch Institute for Global Sport, where she serves as academic director and teaches go-to-market strategy at the intersection of sports and business.
Gina’s résumé reads like a tour of the sports business world. Before entering academia, she held roles with the Golden State Warriors, the Brooklyn Nets, and the XFL. Today, she researches and teaches at what she calls the intersection of ethics and enterprise, which is exactly where our conversation lived.
Because here’s the tension she named, and it stuck with me:
Sports betting and prediction markets are among the fastest-growing areas of modern finance, attracting institutional capital, legal battles, and a rapidly expanding cultural footprint. And, in her words, the sector is growing on the back of addiction.
She cited a Fortune report on the numbers: Americans wagered around $167 billion on sports in 2025 alone, and roughly a quarter of sports bettors show signs of being unable to control their gambling. As Gina put it, addiction doesn’t just destroy savings. It destroys relationships and, in the worst cases, lives. These aren’t abstract statistics. They’re real people.
That’s a rare thing to hear from someone working inside this industry, and it’s why this conversation is worth your time, regardless of how you feel about prediction markets.
Her Project: SafeBets
Gina is currently applying her go-to-market expertise to SafeBets, an early-stage prediction platform she is helping develop alongside her teaching.
In the episode, she walks us through how the model is designed to work. Instead of users wagering their own money, the platform gives new users tokens to make predictions. The company says its returns are intended to come from trading against pricing inefficiencies across other prediction markets rather than from participants losing to one another.
Gina frames it as an attempt to create an alternative to the addiction-driven model, allowing people to express their convictions and participate in collective intelligence without putting their own capital on the line.
We asked the questions you’d want asked: Where does the money actually come from? How are winners paid? And how does the platform define the questions people are predicting on?
Her sports analogy here is a good one: Even experts can’t agree on how to define a “sports fan,” illustrating why ambiguity in prediction questions remains a real, unresolved industry problem.
It’s still early days for the venture. As with anything new in this space, do your own research before participating in any platform or token. That goes double for anything involving a future token offering.
💫 Let’s keep shining, keep building!
SheCrypto is powered by the people (yep, that’s you 🚀). Want the alpha and the vibes delivered straight to you? Smash that subscribe button.
This episode and all SheCrypto content is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Not financial advice. Always DYOR.
