A new prediction market has entered the fold, seemingly determined to give the rampant insider trading that its competitors have become known for a run for its money.
Called “CRSHMARKET,” the platform purportedly allows users to bet on potentially any event that happens in a livestream. Gamers playing on Twitch and weird “IRL streamers” that film themselves being a public nuisance on Kick are now effectively fodder for gamblers.
“What if any livestream could become a prediction market?” the company asked in a post on X that recently went viral, which included a brief video ad. “Will her Uber arrive in under 2 minutes? Will he get her phone number? Will he score the next goal?”
These are “markets that have never existed before,” the company added, “until now.”
There’s probably a reason for that. CRSHMARKET’s post, in a mildly successful bit of ragebait marketing, caused people to blow a gasket over the corrupt and fixed bets that it could easily enable.
“We gotta outlaw these things,” one user wrote.
This is “about to produce biblical levels of insider trading and money laundering,” another commenter fumed.
The only assurance CRSHMARKET could offer to this accusation: “We got that covered :),” it replied.
Does it? How is CRSHMARKET supposed to ensure that livestreamers don’t just start faking stuff to win out bets or tell their friends ahead of time what’s going to happen on their next stream? It’s hard enough to stop this with major real world events on platforms like Polymarket, where even government and military insiders are illegally profiting off of their information. The stakes are arguably much lower with livestreams and are more likely to go overlooked.
Now to be clear, it’s unclear just how legit of an operation this is. It hasn’t received any real media coverage or much attention outside its recent viral post. But it does appear to be a real, albeit sleazy, service.
Its CEO and cofounder, 21-year-old Evan Rama, is also behind a “live college dating show” called KupidTV, which according to the student-run newspaper The Mercury at the University of Texas, Dallas, is being sued for allegedly launching a bot attack on a competitor that refused its buyout offer. In April, The Mercury noted, Rama announced that KupidTV had rebranded to CRSHMARKET.
Earlier this week, Rama made a post on LinkedIn claiming that CRSHMARKET just surpassed $10 million in trading volume in just 45 days, and later gloated on X that his “team has mastered virality” after the ad went somewhat viral.
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