Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong revealed that he made nothing from prediction markets when he listed a series of keywords during his company’s conference call.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong revealed that he made nothing from prediction markets when he listed a series of keywords during his company’s conference call.
Coinbase CEO doesn’t regret the fact that at the end of the company’s financial results teleconference, he decided to troll traders a little in the prediction market.
«I was just having a little fun during the teleconference,» Armstrong was quoted as saying by Business Insider .
At the end of Coinbase’s Q3 earnings conference call in late October, Brian Armstrong noted that he knew what prediction markets were betting on. At the time, Polymarket was offering trades on specific words Armstrong might use during the conference call.
«I was a little distracted because I was following the markets for what Coinbase was going to say on the next earnings call, and I just want to add the words ‘Bitcoin,’ ‘Ethereum,’ ‘blockchain,’ ‘stakes,’ and ‘Web3’ here to make sure we get them out before the end of the call,» he said.
In total, traders bet on Kalshi and Polymarket on the topic for approximately $84,000. These were relatively small bets, but Armstrong’s actions illustrated the volatility of many prediction markets, especially so-called «mention markets.»
New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Armstrong if he was concerned about the potential manipulation of prediction markets.
«Yes. Of course, I didn’t trade on it,» replied the Coinbase CEO, whose fortune is $11.4 billion.
After the prank on the teleconference, Armstrong noted that it happened spontaneously when someone on his team posted a link to the so-called «mention markets» in the chat.
Recall that in November 2025 , there were about 100 active bets on the Russian-Ukrainian war on Polymarket — such as whether the Russians would capture Pokrovsk by the end of the year, or when a ceasefire would occur. According to Forbes Ukraine, there were 97 active bets in November for a total of $96.8 million. The largest number of bets ($27 million) was placed on a bet on a ceasefire by the end of 2025, which has about a 5% probability.
Recently, the developers of the PolyGlobe map, which visualizes bets from Polymarket with geolocation, unauthorizedly used the API of the Ukrainian OSINT project DeepState. They wanted to improve the visualization of bets on the capture of Ukrainian cities by the Russians, but after criticism from DeepState, they removed this functionality.
