In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Forkast CEO Chris Gonsalves and Arbitrum Gaming Venture’s Ethen Sy about the rise of prediction markets, and the launch of esports-focused Forkast on the Arbitrum blockchain.
BlockchainGamer.biz: Let’s start with you, Ethan. Can you give us a quick intro?
Ethan Sy: I’m an investor. I spent the past four years at another early-stage gaming venture capital firm called Play Ventures. It invests across both web2 and web3 games. And I recently joined the team at Arbitrum Gaming Ventures. Our sole LP is the Arbitrum DAO, and we’re focused on backing teams, building within both gaming entertainment and gaming-adjacent verticals. One of the first bets that we’ve done is in Chris’s company, Forkast.
I should point out that Arbitrum is an Ethereum-based L2 blockchain, and I think you guys are the only blockchain with a specific gaming fund. Certainly, it’s the only one that’s been active in the last six months or so.
Okay, Chris. What’s your background?
Chris Gonsalves: I’ve been in crypto over a decade now, since 2014. I used to work at the Bitcoin Center in New York. That’s where I met a lot of the OGs like Joe Lubin. I was an options trader back then. I’ve been a huge gamer my entire life. During the ICO boom, I worked at ConsenSys, doing a lot of consulting work, explaining to the first wave of game developers how they could use tokens. After ConsenSys, I went on to create Community Gaming. I was running the largest in-person esports meetup group in New York City. I saw it was really difficult, not just in the city, but everywhere around the world. Paying people was a huge pain point, right?
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If you’re paying people in different parts of the world, Latin America, Asia, that’s a huge pain point that we wanted to solve. So we built Community Gaming. It did everything from managing the registration, the bracket and team management to the automated payouts, for which we use stablecoins. We were one of the first companies to bring stablecoin payments to consumers in emerging markets like Latin America.
About a year and a half ago, we launched predictions through Community Gaming, and they really caught on. I was a Polymarket trader myself, and I saw that it was evolving beyond politics, that it was going to proliferate across many different entertainment verticals.
People were saying, ‘It’s only going to be good for the US election once every four years’. And then they said, ‘OK, well, maybe it’s going to disrupt sports too, but that’s it’. But I’m here to say prediction markets are going to take market share from every single type of trading application.
Not just sports betting, but perps and crypto trading, memecoin trading, and even stock trading and options trading. We launched Forkast a little under a year ago [on Ronin], and then in November 2025, we migrated to Arbitrum, where we’re focused specifically on gaming and esports verticals.
Why did Arbitrum Gaming Ventures think prediction markets generally, and Forkast specifically, was a good investment?
ES: First, I’ll dial back to when I was at Play Ventures. On the web2 side, it was about investing in founders who really understand gaming from first principles. Whether that’s a game studio or playable apps. I’ve taken a lot of that thinking to Arbitrum, thinking about how gaming is starting to seep into everyone’s daily lives.
Equally, in the previous cycle, we’ve seen people investing in blockchain games because they expected super huge outcomes, but this was aligned, because investors were only actually looking for a quick exit, while the builders were coming to blockchain because it was easier to raise funding. But now you can really see whether or not these teams are actually building for the future. So the worst time to invest was when everyone thought blockchain games were the future. Now expectations have crated. But I think this is the time to be making those bets.
Going back to Forkast, I actually worked with Chris when I was at Play Ventures, and from my conversations with Chris, from seeing his journey, we were able to identify that Chris was early to this prediction market phenomenon, and he was building in a market where he could potentially win. He has the right foundations and the right infrastructure to build on.
Can you explain what Forkast is?
CG: It’s a peer-to-peer exchange where you can predict on real-world events. Forkast is for esports fans, sports fans, crypto traders, and it’s where they converge and they can trade on everything from an esports match to an NBA game to an economic or stock outcome. That’s my definition.
There are already some very large incumbents, multi-billion-dollar companies, so how do you position Forkast in competition with them?
CG: For one, we’re focused outside the US in emerging markets, so places such as Latin America in particular. Sports betting is ingrained in the culture there. Typically, when you’re using a traditional sports betting site, you are betting against the house, right? So there are a lot of disadvantages. If you’re really good, they can throttle you. They can ban you. You’re also probably only trading or betting on a narrow vertical of a soccer match or football match.
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Whereas with prediction markets, you are betting peer to peer. You’re not getting throttled. Everyone’s welcome. There’s no black box of odds. And you may come for a football match, but then discover that you want to trade on something to do with the Fed or with Tesla. That’s one advantage.
You can provide better odds and better features that are more user-centric than traditional sports betting. And because we are in emerging markets, they tend to be lower ticket sizes. You don’t need as much liquidity to satisfy a lot of retail traders. So we are positioning ourselves as a prediction market for gamers and esports fans in emerging markets where they tend to have smaller average trade size. In addition, we provide liquidity rewards. We have a daily USDC rewards pool in featured markets every 24 hours.
Why do you think esports is such a good market?
CG: A lot of people have been focused on the US market, US sports in particular. You could make a case that’s starting to get saturated. That’s a competitive area. But it’s not like people around the world don’t like trading stocks, don’t like watching sports, don’t like watching esports. There’s a huge untapped audience.
We think esports is going to have a huge growth spurt this year. Esports is still massively watched. There are record viewership numbers. Last week, Mobile Legends became the fourth most-watched esports event. And then you have League of Legends getting nearly 7 million peak concurrent viewers. Most of this isn’t coming from the US. The data is saying that the viewership is there.
When you look at the esports market as a whole, the majority of what’s considered the esports market is coming from traditional betting companies that offer esports betting. So while there’s been a winter for esports teams and esports orgs, viewership has been up and to the right. Viewers have shown they want to bet and they want to watch their favorite players and their favorite teams.
We’re esports-native. Coming from Community Gaming, we’re focused on an area that the other prediction markets are not as focused on. We have boots on the ground, team members in Brazil, Argentina, so I think we have a real advantage, and it’s an untapped area that’s going to grow.
Are USDC quests like a play-to-earn incentive?
CG: That’s a bit of a dirty word these days. But it’s not just these liquidity rewards. We have a bunch of gamified features. We have daily quests too. You can even start trading for free, using a credit code from a creator you’re following. You redeem it. You get $20 of free trading credit. Now you’re trading on whatever markets you like best, and you’re getting rebates back from completing daily quests. You’re doing daily quests. You’re competing on leaderboards. You’re earning badges and achievements on your profile page. You could link your Twitch and stream while you’re trading.
There are a lot of these elements in terms of making it more accessible. Just like Robinhood. Eventually, you want to abstract away the order book and the complexities of hopping in and out of positions. Taking a page out of the web3 gaming playbook makes sense, especially in our case, where we’re going after emerging markets where users are used to mobile games. This is a new type of trading product that they’re not as used to.
How do you deal with UGC? Can users set up their own markets?
CG: We have a pretty active Discord. People suggest markets. We are the ones who will create the market and resolve it. But we do take user-generated markets, and we share the fees that we generate from those particular markets if they’re attributed to another user. It’s a little bit too early for us to just allow users to create their own markets from start to finish, because then you get things like the rules may not have good integrity. If that happens, people blame the platform.
But we’re also starting to integrate with more automated oracles for resolution. Next month, we’ll go live with Chainlink, so if we have a market about the hourly Bitcoin price, the markets will be originated and resolved without human intervention. It’ll just check the price with Chainlink, and then it’ll restrike the next hour’s price again. We want to move to more automated resolution over time. We also want to take in a lot of user-generated recommendations, whether it’s prop markets or more interesting and novel markets. We’re just going to have to have that layer of integrity, checking to make sure the rules are clear for everyone, so there’s no potential for ambiguous outcomes.
One of the significant things about crypto prediction markets like Forkast is how they fulfil the potential of blockchain in terms of allowing global access to decentralized information, and the ability to earn returns if you’re skilled.
CG: Yes. The US stock market is the deepest pool of any capital market in the world, right? And so you want more people to access that, whether it’s through trading tokenized stocks, through options, and now through hedging certain positions through stock-based prediction markets.
And as I mentioned, the audience is absolutely massive for esports. Most of that viewership is coming from emerging markets, coming from even mobile games like Mobile Legends, which is hitting record viewership numbers. Counter-Strike is the largest game for esports betting. We want to cater to that market. We’re demystifying it, we’re gamifying it, just like Robinhood did for options. We’re here to win the esports market with Forkast.
Finally, what do the esports teams think about this?
CG: I think they see it as a fan engagement layer. What you’re talking about is the esports teams that have failed to monetize. They ended up taking in a lot of sponsorship money from brands. They didn’t really build a lot of tech. They didn’t really move beyond advertising dollars.
With traditional sports, the leagues share revenue with the teams, which creates a huge foundational layer of revenue that you get no matter what, even if you’re the worst team in the league. That’s not the same case with gaming and esports. It’s at a bigger disadvantage. But you are seeing companies like Riot Games start to share a pretty large amount of skin revenue. That’s where a lot of teams’ revenue is coming from now.
I think prediction markets will create a deeper layer of engagement where you can have predictions that follow teams across the season. It’s about what’s going to happen in the game tonight, but also what’s going to happen from season to season. And prediction markets are superior to traditional gambling platforms in many ways. So I think the esports teams probably want to move away from the non-peer-to-peer platforms into these more peer-to-peer platforms that are more user-centric.
Check out Forkast at Forkast.gg
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