Public Launch AI Agent powered Prediction Markets Without Sports

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This piece was written by Pet Berisha and researched with Omar El Safy.

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Public are launching prediction markets today, 24 September 2026, with no sports or entertainment contracts.

For the uninitiated, Public are a New York brokerage that launched in 2019. They sell themselves as the first “agentic brokerage”, and offer stocks, ETFs, options, bonds, crypto and treasuries in one app. Their backers include Accel and Tiger Global.

Predicted spoke to Leif Abraham, Public's co-founder and co-CEO, ahead of the launch.

It was fascinating. Many may read a press release that has ‘Agents’ and ‘Prediction Markets’ in the body and instantly scream ‘hype’, but when you break it down, it makes so much sense.

The product is called AI Agents for Prediction Markets

The categories at launch are crypto, commodities, climate, economics, corporate events, markets, indices, tech and science, and politics and elections. Public describe the set as “events that move the markets”.

Their press release gives three examples of what an agent can be told to do.

These feel like fringe cases for retail investors.

But the reality is that as financial products and derivatives become more complex, 24/7 and AI-powered, the front end needs to become simpler and more automated.

Leif's line in the release is that “prediction markets give those agents a new input: real-world events. Members can take a position on the event directly, or use the market's data as the signal that triggers a trade anywhere else in their portfolio.”

(psst. Public's COO Stephen Sikes was on the Tokenized podcast last month)

I asked Leif why Public have drawn such a hard line when every other brokerage is adding sports contracts, because that is where the volume and the revenue are right now.

His answer was about who Public are built for.

“In our space, you have to be clear who you design for. In the US brokerage space you can look at it as people who have the assets and the means to invest. They have money left over at the end of the month to put into the markets; they have a portfolio that can compound. Call them proper investors, for lack of better wording. That is essentially the top 25% in the US. The other 75% live paycheque to paycheque, or on a credit card.”

“If you build for the middle of the market, you need to monetise from transactions and loans. If you build for the top quartile, your goal is to compound assets and monetise those assets. They are very different user types. We design for the top quartile.”

On event contracts specifically, he described a spectrum.

“The instrument of the event contract, a.k.a. prediction markets, has been stretched. The spectrum of what event contracts are being used for goes from very serious use cases to not serious at all, placing a trade, a.k.a. a bet, on who is going to win Love Island next weekend. We design for people managing their life savings. In that space you serve them for things around their portfolio. You are not the place for entertainment finance.”

This is something we have discussed on Predicted over and over again. When you are building in the prediction market space, you have to figure out who your customer is.

When Coinbase $COIN ( ▲ 0.03% ) got into prediction markets, it surprised me, and my reasoning was the user profile. The churn you get from someone buying bitcoin and watching it fall 5% is a different animal to someone buying “yes, bitcoin will be above this price” and watching it go to zero. Coinbase can charge a big spread on a normal person buying spot bitcoin. That is a low-volume, high-margin product. Event contracts are the opposite. They are high volume and low margin (though vertically integrated players are showing margins can be high in the short term), which means you need a specific type of customer churning contracts over and over again, and market makers and traders trading in these markets consistently.

Leif said that “margins are high right now, but will get eroded in the next few years.”

I asked whether a shock was coming in two or three years for the brokerages and exchanges that have bolted a totally different form factor of trading onto their products.

His response was incredibly interesting:

“Everyone knows exactly what they are doing. I do not have public data on this, but my belief is that a lot of the crypto volumes have moved to prediction markets. Not the buy and hold volumes. The memecoin trading, and specifically the casual meme stock trader. The casual, everyday person who just wants to get some dopamine out of placing a trade. In the past, that happened on memecoins; I think it is now happening in sports and entertainment contracts.”

On churn, he agreed with me, and he said Public see it in their own numbers.

“The churn behaviour is very similar. The churn of a casual crypto trader is very high. In the short term they look like profitable users, and then very quickly they are not. It is a very tricky customer to build a durable business on, because you have to refurbish your funnel all the time. These people just churn so heavily, so quickly.”

Since the rise of prediction markets, the word “hedge” has started to lose its meaning. As we previously covered on Predicted, an ice cream shop in Los Angeles was paying part of its rent with weather contracts, and the headline was that they had made money.

But a hedge should not make you money. It should manage your risk.

So I asked Leif whether Public would ever get involved on the corporate side of sports exposure, where a company with real exposure to a sports event hedges it on an event contract venue rather than through an OTC (over-the-counter) desk.

“We are a retail platform, and the reality is that most retail investors are going long. You can short on Public; there are ways to do it, but the vast majority of retail investors are going long. Hedging generally is a real use case, and some people will do it. Is it going to be a major use case? I personally do not believe that.”

“If you are a big organisation and you can run the model, if it suddenly starts raining and I am the manager of the US Open and fewer people come to my event, and you forecast what the pricing needs to be for you to come out the good end of that, okay, possible. How often will that truly happen? Questionable.”

What he is more excited about is retail investors taking a position on one part of a company, rather than hedging.

“You can zoom into a specific KPI around a company and place a trade on that. Retail investors often have a very good thesis on one specific thing around a company, but big companies in the US nowadays are all conglomerate holding companies. Look at SpaceX IPO-ing, and it is four businesses under the hood. If you are into Tesla, you want to be able to place a trade just on the deliveries of the cars, and not be bogged down by the energy business, or battery storage, or what they are saying on the earnings call about building robots.”

“You have so many retail investors going, wait a minute, I thought this number would go up, it went up, I placed my trade, but because of other things and how the street was forecasting something else, now I am down. That happens every single day. The ability to dissect company performance is one of the things I am most excited about.”

Ten years ago, very few people managed their own money. This week I found myself looking at moving my pensions out of a managed product and into one I run myself, because if you have some financial understanding, agents you have trained and goals you have set, you can start to piece together the puzzle that used to be packaged up and sold to you as a product. This disintermediation angle had Leif nodding his head when I spoke to him.

But these financial complexities need abstracting, and that is the argument for an AI-native front end.

The products underneath are getting more complicated, more numerous and open around the clock.

The layer the customer touches therefore has to get simpler, and the only way it gets simpler while the back end gets more complex is if something in between does the work.

Leif's version of that starts with what a prediction market is for inside a portfolio.

“Because of the AI agent layer on top of it, it is not just about placing a trade on a contract. It is using the contract's probability data as a signal for trading something completely different. You could have an event contract on a Fed decision, which some people would see as a very speculative trade, and say, if the probability of a rate hike at the next Fed meeting goes above 75%, sell my treasury bonds. That is a connection between an event contract and a treasury bond trade, which is maybe the most conservative thing in a normal portfolio.”

Right now, agents are mostly there to help with the execution of ideas, not give you ideas — as Leif puts it.

“We will get there step by step, but even regulatory-wise there is a difference between self-directed, where I have an idea, I may have finessed it using the AI, and I put it in place as a strategy that I have approved and co-created, and the AI just doing something on your behalf like a financial advisor with full control over your account. That needs a whole different level of trust and safety.”

The mechanics, as he described them, are that you prompt an idea, the AI asks follow-up questions until it has a fully formed strategy, it shows you a visualisation of the workflow, and you swipe to confirm.

“The minute you confirm, that thing is literally written in code. So now it cannot hallucinate. It is a deterministic workflow that runs from there. You know exactly what it is going to do. That is an architectural decision we made to turn this into something you can use with real money.”

One thing I think is under-discussed is what these contracts do for someone who does not want to sell, for whatever reason, but want to hedge against downside price.

If you hold an asset and you are nine months into a twelve-month holding period that changes your tax treatment, you are incentivised to keep holding it even if you are certain it is going down. A binary contract lets you express the view without selling the asset.

Leif told me tax optimisation is already one of the most popular things Public's agents do.

“For our user type, the top quartile, they care a lot about their taxes. If you have a real portfolio with real money in it, tax optimisation becomes a logical thing. One type of agent that is very popular is portfolio-wide tax loss harvesting. JPMorgan would try to sell you that for a hefty management fee, and then only do it on a direct index of the S&P. Now an agent can do it, and you can set that up in 14 seconds if you want to.”

“It only has a major impact on larger accounts. And that is where agents help, because thinking through that stuff and finding those opportunities is where AI can be tremendously helpful. Start with, I have my bitcoin position, I do not want to liquidate it until a certain date, keep an eye out for opportunities to do some tax optimisation along the way without me selling it.”

On the face of it, these are incredibly complicated things. But if an agent is compressing the complex actions and products into a more sanitised, digestible decision for the user, then it makes a lot of sense.

This doesn’t feel like a company chasing the AI and Prediction Market hype for the sake of it. This is just the logical way to build a product like this that helps their customers build wealth and manage risk. While there is a lot of controversy around this industry, launches like this show that there is potential amongst the frothy hypergrowth and regulatory uncertainty we’re witnessing.

Predicted is written by Pet Berisha and Omar El Safy. Find every newsletter, our quarterly State of Prediction Markets reports and more at predicted.co.

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