David Yaffe-Bellany

It's all sort of fair game.

No, thank you.

Anyway, at the end of this earnings call.

Armstrong says, oh, I've actually been looking at the prediction markets.

Then he just reels off a list of the words that people were betting on, you know, influencing the market directly.

Now, Armstrong has said that he personally wasn't betting on this market.

He didn't have a stake in what he was going to say.

But it's an illustration of how easily these markets could be manipulated.

Yeah.

It could happen.

So the CFTC does have a rule against insider trading, but this is such a new area that it hasn't really been tested.

So it remains kind of a big question mark.

Kalshi, which is PolyMarket's biggest competitor, has taken the position that insider trading is bad and that there are protections in place on the platform to prevent it and to report it.

But there are other people in the kind of prediction market sphere who actually think insider trading is a good thing.

And that goes back to that kind of high-minded goal behind some of these products, that they could become a source of truth in the world.

Sure.

If what you want to do is produce the best possible projection about what will happen to Nicolas Maduro, then if someone who has insider information about that is placing bets and moving the market, you end up with a much better projection.

Yeah, absolutely.

And these companies have taken a big reputational hit from some of these incidents over the past few months.

But look, I've covered these sorts of strange financial instruments for a long time.