A Founding Father of Blockchain Heps to Reinvent the Prediction Industry

Prediction has become one of the most talked-about corners of the Internet. Millions of people now stake opinions on elections, economic data, sports, and world events, and prediction markets have moved from the fringe toward the financial mainstream. But as the industry has grown, so have the questions that shadow it. Can you trust the forecast in front of you? Was it manipulated? And is any of this really more than a new coat of paint on gambling?

One of the people who helped invent the very technology of digital trust believes those questions finally have an answer. W. Scott Stornetta, widely regarded as a founding father of blockchain, has joined SafeBets.world, a zero-wager prediction platform, as Chair of its Advisory Council. His aim is ambitious: to reinvent the prediction industry on a foundation of verifiable trust.

Stornetta is an unusually credible person to make that case. In 1991, he and his longtime collaborator Stuart Haber published “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document,” introducing the cryptographic methods for linking and verifying records that would become a cornerstone of blockchain. Their work appears among the very first citations in the 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper.

In the decades since, Stornetta co-founded Surety, whose chain of verified records, published weekly in the New York Times, has run unbroken for thirty years, and more recently SureMark Digital, which fights deepfakes by letting people prove their identity and authorship in a world where seeing is no longer believing.

What connects that career to prediction is a single idea. A forecast is only as credible as your certainty about who made it and that it has not been altered after the outcome is known. Yet much of today’s prediction landscape offers little of that certainty. Identities are thin or anonymous, track records are not independently verifiable, and the largest platforms are built on wagering, which invites both regulatory scrutiny and the lingering perception that prediction is simply betting by another name.

SafeBets is built to test a different approach. Users forecast outcomes across crypto, commodity, stock, and currency markets without placing a wager, and the platform rewards the most accurate predictors and aggregates their judgment into what it calls Collective Intelligence. Under Stornetta’s guidance, the company plans to credential its leading predictors and record their forecasts verifiably, so that a prediction carries cryptographic proof of who made it and when, and cannot be quietly revised after the fact. The goal is a prediction platform whose track record anyone can audit.

“For thirty years, our work was about making records impossible to forge,” Stornetta said. “Prediction is a natural next step. If you can prove who made a forecast and that it was never altered, you can finally trust the track record behind it.”

“The prediction industry has a credibility problem, and credibility is exactly what Scott has spent his life engineering,” said Alex Konanykhin, founder and chief executive of SafeBets. “His leadership lets us hold forecasting to a standard the industry has never had.”

Reinventing an industry is a tall order, and prediction’s future will still turn on adoption and on a regulatory picture that remains unsettled. But the ambition points beyond any single company. If forecasting can be rebuilt on verifiable trust, prediction could shed its association with speculation and become something more valuable: a transparent, auditable measure of what a crowd genuinely believes about the future. The first era of blockchain taught machines to agree on what is true. Stornetta is now working to make our predictions about the future worth trusting.