GalaxyOne Head Wants Retail Investors to Stake More, Predict Less

In brief

• GalaxyOne Head Zac Prince said he’s “not particularly excited” about prediction markets when it comes to enabling customers to build long-term wealth.
• The executive highlighted the retail investment platform’s recent support of Solana staking and associated lending products in the firm’s pipeline.
• Staking has enabled competitors like Coinbase to diversify revenue, while others like Robinhood have embraced prediction markets as growth drivers.

For Galaxy’s retail investment platform, enabling customers to bet on the news isn’t a priority, according to Zac Prince, head of GalaxyOne. Rather, the service that debuted in October is being built in a way that’s intended to reward investors’ patience, he told Decrypt.

Within the context of Galaxy’s broader business, Prince said the financial services and investment management firm is already in a good place as far as prediction markets are concerned, providing institutional clients with internal trading and risk management.

When it comes to consumers that GalaxyOne was built for, who have anywhere between $100,000 and $1 million in investible assets, he described prediction markets as tools that may not align with many affluent consumers for building long-term wealth.

“For individual consumers, I’m not particularly excited about it versus other things we have on our roadmap,” he said. “I haven’t been able to find a use case for someone who’s building a diversified portfolio—that they’re going to allocate to for the long term—for prediction markets.”

In some ways, the sentiment echoes commentary from Charles Schwab President and CEO Rick Wurster, who indicated this week that America’s largest discount brokerage would limit prediction-market access to wagers focused on financial events if it enters that territory.

Prince argued that there are two ways to be successful as a consumer-facing financial services offering: cater to investors who want time in the market to be the driving force, like Vanguard or Betterment, or seek customers that view themselves as active traders. 

Retail brokerages like Robinhood have embraced prediction markets by working with Kalshi, providing what analysts have described as a sports-fueled tailwind. Still, Prince indicated GalaxyOne isn’t trying to develop a platform “where you want people to log in every day.”