Prediction Markets Are Booming in the U.S. and Blocked in Canada. One Startup Is Betting It Can Change That.

In the United States, betting on the future has become a multibillion-dollar habit. Prediction markets, where people trade contracts on the outcome of real-world events from interest rates to ball games, have exploded from a niche curiosity into a mainstream financial product. Combined monthly trading volume on the two largest platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket, climbed from under $5 billion in September 2025 to roughly $24 billion this past April, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. For Canadians, though, the boom has been something to watch rather than join.

The reason is not simply that Canada is squeamish about gambling. The wall that has kept these platforms out is built mostly from securities and derivatives law. Since 2017, Canadian securities regulators have banned the sale of short-term binary options to retail investors, the very rule that most directly captures yes-or-no event contracts. When Polymarket reached Canadians, it was a securities regulator that acted: the Ontario Securities Commission penalized the company and barred it from the province until 2027. The only authorized way in has been narrow. This spring, the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization cleared Wealthsimple to offer Kalshi contracts as regulated derivatives, and the resulting Wealthsimple Predict app, launching this summer, is limited to economic, financial, and climate markets. The sports and political contracts that drive most of the American volume are left out entirely.

The net effect is a Canadian prediction market that is tiny, tightly boxed, and only just beginning to open.

Into that gap steps a different kind of platform. SafeBets.world, operated by Foresight Collective, Inc., is built around a feature that separates it from every name in the headlines: its users risk nothing. On the platform, people forecast the future prices of assets across crypto, commodity, stock, and currency markets. They make no deposit and place no wager. The system scores each forecast against real, time-stamped market outcomes and rewards its most accurate predictors, but the rewards are not drawn from other users' losses. They are funded by a separate, affiliated trading operation that acts on the aggregated intelligence of the platform's best forecasters. No participant can lose money, because no participant puts any money at risk.

The mechanic is not merely theoretical. The company recently announced its first prizes to the top forecasters of the 2026 World Cup group stage. Three predictors, from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States, each received a $10,000 cash reward, along with an allocation of Unicoin, the platform's cryptocurrency, of one million, 500,000, and 250,000 unicoins respectively, in recognition of their forecasting accuracy. None of them staked anything to take part, and none could have lost money by playing. It is a concrete illustration of the platform's central claim, that people can compete, and win, on the strength of their judgment alone.

That design is the heart of the company's pitch in markets where conventional platforms are unwelcome. Because there is no wager, SafeBets argues, it is not gambling, and so it sits outside the rules written to govern betting. In the United States, where many gambling statutes are defined around the act of placing a wager, that argument has a clear target. Minnesota just became the first state to make operating a prediction market a crime, and its new law is keyed explicitly to a consumer placing a wager, the one thing a no-stake platform does not ask anyone to do.

Canada is a more complicated test, and here the company's not-gambling framing only carries part of the weight. The barrier in Canada was assembled chiefly from securities and derivatives law, not gambling law. A platform can avoid being a bet and still attract the interest of securities regulators, depending on how its rewards, its trading activity, and any associated digital tokens are structured. No Canadian regulator has ruled on SafeBets. It has not launched in the country. And whether a no-stake model funded by trading falls inside or outside the securities framework is, at this point, an untested question. The company's position is that taking away the wager takes away the problem. Canadian regulators have not weighed in, and a prudent reader should treat the question as open rather than settled.

If the model does hold up, the prize is considerable. SafeBets would be reaching precisely the audience Canada's rules currently shut out, and doing so while structurally removing the harms that motivated those rules in the first place. The concerns Canadian and American lawmakers cite most often, financial loss, addiction, and the exposure of young people to betting, are inseparable from the possibility of losing money. A platform on which the worst possible outcome is an incorrect guess is a fundamentally different proposition than one built on the prospect of loss. The company also frames its approach as rewarding analytical skill rather than the size of a bankroll, and as a low-stakes way for newcomers to learn how markets actually move.

Skeptics will note that the prediction industry is young, fiercely competitive, and already drawing regulatory scrutiny on both sides of the border, and that a novel model promising to sidestep the rules is exactly the kind of claim regulators tend to examine closely. SafeBets has yet to prove its thesis anywhere at scale, let alone in Canada's cautious environment.

Still, the larger trend is hard to dismiss. The prediction wave is coming to Canada one way or another. The Wealthsimple and Kalshi partnership brings it through the front door of derivatives regulation, slowly and within strict limits. SafeBets is betting, so to speak, that there is another door entirely, one that opens precisely because no one is wagering at all. Whether Canada's regulators come to see it that way will go a long way toward deciding how big this market becomes here, and who ultimately gets to take part.