Crypto Traders Now "Fleeing" to Prediction Markets to Bet on Events

Crypto Traders Flee to Prediction Bets After $150 Billion Crash

Not long ago, Nikshep Saravanan was deep in the crypto trenches — trading memecoins, reaching out to venture capitalists, and trying to launch a startup for digital creators. By January, he’d dropped it all. These days, he spends hours on prediction markets, tracking odds on everything from sports to politics.

“As I was trying to get traction without funding, the prediction-markets space started blowing up,” recalled the 27-year-old Canadian.

Saravanan is part of a fast-growing wave of crypto-native traders cooling on the token economy and gravitating toward event betting. Where the action once revolved around meme coins and protocol launches, it’s now about interest-rate decisions, NBA games, and weather forecasts. It’s not fringe anymore: weekly notional volume across platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi has surged from $500 million in June to nearly $6 billion in January, according to tracker Dune.

U.S. Securities Enforcement: Our predictions for 2026

Consistent with patterns from past administrations, we expect U.S. securities enforcement to accelerate modestly in 2026. The SEC and FINRA will likely focus increasingly on cases about foreign actors, artificial intelligence (AI), and other emerging technologies, alongside traditional areas of enforcement with an emphasis on addressing investor harm.

Fiscal year 2025 marked a period of significant change in U.S. securities enforcement. The SEC encouraged staff to leave, made it harder to open investigations, and made it easier for potential defendants to dissuade the Commission from bringing charges. At the same time, the agency signaled a renewed focus on cases involving “genuine harm and bad acts,” rather than victimless procedural failings.

Against that backdrop, it is unsurprising that SEC enforcement activity dropped substantially in 2025. But we expect that downward trend to stabilize, if not modestly reverse, in 2026.

Would Specific SEC Disclosure Guidelines Deter AI-Washing?

In the current business environment, most companies face increasing pressure to demonstrate their artificial intelligence (AI) credentials. Unfortunately, some companies, in responding to this pressure, have overstated their AI prospects or capabilities, a phenomenon commonly described as “AI-washing.” These concerns have prompted renewed debate over whether the Securities and Exchange Commission should adopt AI-specific disclosure guidance to address the risk of misleading technology narratives.

In considering whether AI disclosure guidance would be beneficial, it is useful to examine concrete examples of alleged overstatements of technological capabilities. Two such examples are the November 2025 criminal indictment of Marcus Cobb, the CEO of Mozaic Payments, Inc., and an early 2010s SEC enforcement action against e-Smart Technologies. Although separated by more than a decade and involving different technologies, both matters illustrate how seemingly impressive technology narratives can become central features of alleged fraud schemes.

Billionaire Sprott Bags 678% Return on Idle Nevada Gold Mine

Hycroft Mining Holding Corp., the owner of a non-operational gold and silver mine in northern Nevada, has seen its shares soar more than 425% over the past two months as precious metals prices have climbed to record highs.

That’s delivered glittering returns for its largest investor, Canadian billionaire Eric Sprott, a longtime gold bug whose stake has increased 746% in value to more than $2.1 billion.

Hycroft is riding the updrafts of a staggering rally in the spot silver and gold market that has seen prices soar in the past year. Even though Hycroft doesn’t yet have a clear plan to mine its underground reserves, the company’s stock still serves as a way for investors to buy into the precious metals boom. Source:

4th Circuit: Shareholder Claims and SEC Investigation “Logically and Causally” Related

Questions whether two sets of circumstances are or are not interrelated are among the most vexing insurance coverage disputes out there. These questions often are even more fraught because of the significant amounts of money that can depend on the answer. All of these considerations were in play in a recent Fourth Circuit decision in which the appellate court concluded in the Under Armour case that because prior shareholder litigation and a later SEC investigation were “logically and causally” related, they represented a single claim triggering only one $100 million insurance tower, rather than a second $100 million tower, as the company had argued….