OpinionKings opened for paper trading on June 20 and has run about 2 million in play-money volume since, from a user base Harshit Geddam puts at just over 700.
Kalshi and Polymarket sell a market page. Geddam is selling a video feed — users scroll short-form clips and trade from inside them, and he says the surprise of the first two months was that they mostly weren't going to the market page at all.
"So we are not going to people through prediction markets we are going to the people through where already the media and like the audiences are living which is social media."
Geddam is Head of Technology at OpinionKings, the creator-driven prediction market app he founded, and he is taking it through an introducing-broker license before a dollar of real money changes hands on it.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 32 minutes of audio, 14 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Harshit Geddam, Head of Technology at OpinionKings, the social prediction market app he founded, now in play-money testing on iOS
🎙️ Host: Chris Gerlacher, who covers the prediction market industry for Prediction News and interviews its operators weekly on this show
📰 Published: 9 September 2026
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 32 min | ✅ Time saved: 18 min
Key Takeaways
The gap he is building into is the walk from a social feed to a trading app
People read the news on X, Discord, Telegram and Instagram, then leave for Robinhood or Kalshi to act on it
Every creator on the platform carries a credibility score, computed from their own trading and their audience's
The pitch to a follower is a visible win rate — a trader with 80% gets followed and paid
A creator with 1,000 subscribers at $10 a month clears roughly $10,000 inside the app
He says the company treats creators as employees and recruits them personally
Paper trading produced 2 million in volume in about two months, and it came through reels rather than the market page
The target is 15,000 users before real-money trading opens
Each user currently holds $10,000 of play credit, which he expects will make real-money behavior more cautious
He is not competing with Kalshi or Polymarket — he wants to sell liquidity into their quietest markets
His own team's read: non-sports markets pull in less than $10,000 of liquidity
He puts sports at 60-70% of volume on the two big exchanges, and is deliberately skipping it
Politics, entertainment, crypto, weather and climate are the categories he says content can wake up
Insider trading is the risk he names in creator-driven markets, and the answer he offers is an algorithm that flags hyped markets and blocks the accounts behind them
1. The Trade Happens Elsewhere
Gerlacher opened by asking where the idea of matching short-form video to prediction markets came from. Geddam answered by describing a broken user journey.
People already follow economic, crypto and breaking news on X, Discord, Telegram and Instagram and talk about their convictions there, Geddam said, but on those platforms "they are not able to trade"
The friction he is attacking is the handoff between the two apps. "There's a disconnect where they just try to like consume content on social media platforms and then they disconnect to the platform and go to a platform like Robinhood or like Kalshi to trade," he said
His framing of the fix: "So that's how the idea is like to bring polls directly to your social media layer where people can just consume and like trade within the same platform there itself" — a feed wired into what he called prediction market terminals
Creators sit in the middle of that design. Because so many of them already talk publicly about news and economics, he said, they arrive with enough standing for an audience to act on what they say
2. A Creator Credibility Score
Gerlacher said the credibility angle was new to him: "I hadn't thought about the credibility of content creators when they integrate markets into their content." Geddam's answer was that credibility on existing platforms is measured by the wrong things.
On Instagram and comparable feeds, he said, a creator's standing comes from likes, shares and views. On OpinionKings the more popular content is still "shown to the people on a higher level" — but a trading record now sits alongside it
The signals traders post on Telegram and Discord carry no track record, and that is the hole the score fills. People share their calls and their predictions there, he said, and "no one knows the credibility" of the person posting them
"So what now on Opinion Kings happens is like we will have a credibility score across particular content creator." On how it is computed: "So the credibility score is calculated through different type of algorithms and basically based on their behavior and like how they're participating in those markets as well as how their audiences are like kind of part participating and engaging with the creator"
What a follower sees is a record they can price. In Geddam's example a stranger checks a creator's trades, sees that "his win rate is like 80%", and decides to follow him and pay for his content
A feature called rooms turns that into revenue: creators publish personalized content to their own audiences, who follow, subscribe to their channels and receive "the premium signals"
He compared the missing piece to a LinkedIn profile. "So I will go first check on LinkedIn to check his profile saying that how credible is this particular person on his entire career," he said of researching a founder — while "traders doesn't have something like that"
3. Bluster vs Real Authority
Asked how important it was to filter online personalities by real authority rather than volume, Geddam reframed the question around who joins a new platform first.
Attention is one input, he said, and there are creators already doing well elsewhere — but on a newly built ecosystem the standing is earned inside it rather than imported
Small creators elsewhere cannot "monetize their conviction value," in his phrase; on a new platform they can build the standing instead. The initial creators contribute "to build a reputation and credibility," he said, so that they can monetize to larger audiences once the platform grows
The incentive is explicitly tiered: the more credible or, in his words, more authorized creator "will be paid more within the platform"
4. Marketing Boring Markets
Gerlacher asked why the company targets the creator economy so intensely. Geddam's answer moved from monetization generally to a specific complaint about how non-sports markets are presented.
Everything runs on visible credibility now — followers, likes, and on platforms like X, people making a living from posting. Prediction markets, he said, give people the venue to discuss anything but not to act on it in the same place
"So the creators are the people who drive the markets." The company is deliberately not chasing sports; the categories he named are economics, entertainment, crypto and similar topics
Two problems with those markets, in his telling: the liquidity does not arrive, and the market cards themselves are unappealing — "those market cards like look very boring too"
The remedy is education before trading. Creators produce knowledgeable content on those asset classes, he said, and once their audiences understand a topic they trade markets that previously had no liquidity at all
His worked example is oil. "When a creator like talks across oil prices he puts his thesis across," he said, tying it to what happened in the world the day before — the audience consumes the news and trades on it
The distribution logic is that Gen Z is already on social media, so the platform goes to them rather than the reverse. "So we are not going to people through prediction markets we are going to the people through where already the media and like the audiences are living which is social media"
5. Creators as Employees
Gerlacher put the strategic question directly: is the content gap why the company is not doing what he has seen advertised elsewhere — generating markets inside social feeds — and instead using creators as an organic source of traffic to markets that are hard to find? Geddam said yes.
"So like we technically heavily depend on creators." The company has built a team whose job is to reach out to creators personally
"At the same time, we treat them as our employees." Creators get credibility and what he called perks, on the reasoning that they are the ones producing the content that makes a market worth trading
The arithmetic he uses to recruit them is a subscription business. A creator good at one thing — crypto, in his example — posts on that topic, and followers pay a $10 monthly subscription for premium content. "So think about like if he collects like 1,000 people at $10 in a month at the same venue he will be almost making $10,000 within the platform itself," he said, calling it a big paycheck
He said the company does not describe itself as a prediction market at all, but as a social media layer that helps creators make money — with the prediction market as the venue where a creator's thesis gets acted on
6. Reels Beat the Market Page
Asked how adoption has gone since launch, Geddam gave the first hard numbers of the interview — all of them from a play-money product.
"So basically we started our like play money and like the paper trading on June 20th", and within a couple of months the platform had run "2 million of trading volume within the platform"
The behavior, not the volume, is what he called the interesting part: "people directly weren't going to the homepage" or the market page to trade
"But the interesting part was like people were consuming content as well as they were like looking across different topics and the reels part was very fascinating where they were just crawling reels on the iOS application." The company shipped an iOS app with a reel-to-trade path — a user watches a clip, scrolls the charts and trades from there
Acquisition is being run as a social network's, not an exchange's. "Our acquisition is like more towards the way that we educate people first of course and we build that network effects like how social media platforms build across and then the people will be trading," he said
On users, he said the company is still early with "more than 700 users at this point", and set a threshold before it switches on real-money trading: "we wanted to go across like 15,000 users", a number he expects to work toward by year end
Creators are also expected to do the acquiring, bringing their own audiences with them as they build their scores
7. Play Money vs Real Money
Gerlacher asked how audience engagement changes once followers start trading, and then why real-money behavior might differ from play money. Geddam volunteered the limits of his own evidence.
"So again like the thesis might be like might not be right at this point because we are operating on a play money environment," he said
What he can see so far is sequencing: when a credible creator posts, the audience consumes the content first and then trades, with the creator's credibility attached to the decision
Every account currently holds a five-figure play balance. "So again like right now we have given like $10,000 to each of the users," he said — play credit, not capital
His expectation for the switch is more caution, not less activity. "So technically when it comes to the real money people would be like really little cautious across what they are spending," he said, while arguing the credibility score will still pull audiences into premium content and trades
He said it will be genuinely interesting to watch how creators and audiences behave once real money is live — a hedge rather than a forecast
8. Complement, Not Competitor
Gerlacher asked whether the company is a competitor or a complement to an exchange like Kalshi or Polymarket. Geddam put it firmly in the second category.
"I would say that we don't compete with platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket", he said, naming Robinhood in the same breath and claiming a separate value proposition
The company's position in the stack is "the top of the funnel" — a social media layer generating content about markets that already exist on other venues
What he says he sells the exchanges is liquidity. "I would say that we will significantly contribute towards the liquidity through creators" and retail users, he said
"I mean Opinion Kings is built for a way where the markets which look boring we want to promote them through content" — entertainment, economics, crypto and politics
His complaint about political markets is that they trade on nothing. On a question like who wins the midterms, he said, "there's no data to back up" the price. A named person with a public view changes that, because a trader can see who said it and weigh it
He raised the obvious objection himself: "At the same time I understand there's a aspect of insider trading." The stated control is algorithmic — flagging "any hyped sentiments or any hyped markets" and blocking the accounts manufacturing them
9. He Skips 60-70% of Volume
Gerlacher noted that the non-sports markets Geddam is targeting are still the smaller share of exchange volume, and that mention markets — contracts on whether a public figure says a given word — face regulatory uncertainty: "Mentions are at least an implied question mark right now and we'll see how they go." He asked how insulated the company feels from shocks of that kind.
Geddam's figure for the concentration: "I think on Polymarket and Kalshi the sports market take like 60% to 70% of the market." The hedge is his
He blamed the framing rather than the users. People treat prediction markets as sports books, he said, but "it's not a sports book technically" — there is a risk factor and a designed order book, and risk mitigation is what the venue actually does
The company was never a sports business. "It was never on to sports," he said of the original project; the intent was always a place where people discuss breaking news and can trade it
He named women as an underserved category, saying they are "not attached to financial markets" today. Entertainment content is his route in — who is chosen at the Oscars, who is eliminated on Love Island season 8 — markets he concedes are boring to trade but says are engaging to watch
"We want people to be educated first", he said, with trading arriving at the bottom of the funnel rather than the top
Gerlacher's read on the strategy: "It's a good uncrowded space there." Geddam agreed that everyone else is focused on sports because sports is a huge category
10. Next: A Broker License
Asked what is next, Geddam laid out a regulatory step, a liquidity claim and a market-size forecast.
"So basically we will be going to the real money trading and we are in a process to get our introducing broker license." That license is what lets it connect to the exchanges and route trades to them
The liquidity number his own team measured is the argument for the whole strategy. His internal tech team analyzes "how much like liquidity is pulled into like the non-sports markets and it is very fascinating to see that it is like in just like less than $10,000," he said — against topics he considers genuinely interesting
"And as prediction markets are like buy equal to sell. So liquidity drives the markets." Every buyer needs a seller, so audiences arriving through content are supply as well as demand
The category list for the platform's own moat: entertainment, politics, crypto, economics, and weather and climate
He wants the app read as an intelligence layer rather than only a trading venue — somewhere a user checks what is going to happen tomorrow and sees "topics which are popping up and breaking news" on the feed, with the option to trade in the same place
Creator pay is meant to make the network hard to leave. Producing a thousand views on politics should eventually "get paid across through the commissions", he said, and creators earning inside the platform make the ecosystem "very hard to like break up"
His size claim for the industry: a "1.5 to 2 trillion dollar economy within 2030". Against a number that large, he said, "So at the same time we don't want to compete we just want to be partners with them"
Bonus Insights
Asked where to find him, Geddam pointed to his LinkedIn profile under his own name and to the iOS App Store for OpinionKings, which hands new users $10,000 of play-money trading credit
His pitch to a new user is not to trade at all at first. "I mean I would tell to the audiences and the new users that just like don't install Opinion Kings to just trade," he said — install it to watch the short-form video, then trade from inside the same terminal
He justified the short-form bet on where earnings already are: "all the genzies make living there", and the company's stated aim is bringing "more and more Gen Z to the platform" in time for what he called the big moment for prediction markets
Gerlacher closed by calling the conversation a deep dive into the dynamics between audiences, creators and prediction markets, a framing Geddam did not qualify
Geddam's bet is that the quiet, non-sports half of prediction markets is illiquid because nobody is explaining it, and that paying creators to explain it — with a public credibility score attached — will send enough retail flow into those contracts to make them tradable.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
OpinionKings (Geddam's platform — a social feed with a reel-to-trade path, creator credibility scores, subscription rooms, and $10,000 of play money per user while it waits on real-money approval)
Kalshi and Polymarket (The exchanges he says he complements rather than competes with, and where he puts sports at 60-70% of volume)
Robinhood (Named alongside the exchanges as a destination users currently leave a social feed to reach)
X, Discord, Telegram and Instagram (Where the conviction and the news already circulate, and where trading signals carry no verifiable track record)
LinkedIn (His comparison for what traders lack — a profile that establishes credibility across a career, and where he tells listeners to follow him)
App Store (The iOS app is live, and he says reels-scrolling on it, not the market page, drove the first two months of paper trading)
Love Island and the Academy Awards (The entertainment outcomes he cites as boring to trade but engaging to watch — his route to an audience he says is not attached to financial markets)
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