Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s CEO, confessed during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Thursday that he was “a little bit distracted” because he’d been “following the prediction market regarding what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call.”
Armstrong then said, “And I just want to include the terms Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to ensure they’re mentioned before the call concludes.”
Why utter those words without any obvious context? As Armstrong suggested, those words were the subject of wagers on “mention markets” on Kalshi and Polymarket, with users betting on whether they would be spoken during the call. Armstrong’s utterance of the words allowed some of those bets to yield payouts.
Bloomberg reports that while mention markets are still a relatively small segment of prediction markets, a total of $84,000 had been wagered on whether specific words would be spoken on the cryptocurrency company’s call. While Armstrong may have assisted some Kalshi and Polymarket users in earning a bit of money, he also demonstrated how easily these markets can be manipulated when executives are aware of them.
Indeed, Jeff Dorman, CIO of digital assets investment firm Arca, posted on X that “you need your head examined if you think it’s cute or clever or savvy that the CEO of the biggest company in this industry openly manipulated a market.”
“It’s not enjoyable to work tirelessly for 8 years attempting to educate institutional investors on the value of crypto investing as an investable asset class and striving to help them become comfortable with this industry, while one of the supposed ‘leaders’ openly mocks the industry with crap like this,” Dorman stated.
Polymarket, in the meantime, posted that Armstrong’s comments were “diabolical work.”
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Coinbase is venturing into supporting prediction markets itself through its Everything Exchange, which Armstrong promoted on the earnings call, and the company has also invested in Kalshi and Polymarket. A Coinbase spokesperson informed Bloomberg that the company forbids employees from participating in prediction markets or engaging in related activity concerning the company.
After Armstrong’s remarks started attracting attention, he posted on X, “lol this was fun – happened spontaneously when someone on our team dropped a link in the chat.”
