My Next Chapter: Chief Intelligence Officer
After six years of Verse Gaming, I've Stepped Down As CEO.
Stepping Down at Verse
I’ve stepped down as CEO of Verse Gaming after six years in the role.
The company I started in my college dorm room with my co-founder and best friend David Rosen has given me an unforgettable experience. Not many people can say they spent their entire 20s building the same tech startup and brand.
I cannot think of a harder startup to try and build than a prediction market product from scratch in 2020, but I’m damn proud that we have and what the space has become. But this is not an end to Verse, and you can read ahead for those details.
For me, Verse has always been more than just my company.
The name itself was built on the vision that peer-to-peer betting would define the future of gaming. Building a “bet on anything” app, and operating variations of that vision for my entire career as a scrappy startup, will always feel like my first true passion.
Seeing that industry come to life almost overnight has only validated the foundational inspiration I started with.
Going from a 21 year old fresh out of college to operating state-licensed gaming products and innovating on the edges of P2P gambling showed me, first hand, how the system actually works.
The US digital gambling industry that spent its entire life as a state-by-state regulated environment has, overnight, become a federally approved land-grab.
The walled gardens of Kalshi, Crypto.com, and Polymarket will soon collect brandnames under their liquidity pools like boy scout badges. Institutions big and small are now turning their attention to what being a market maker truly means.
Verse is built on five years of data about players who want to bet on anything.
From operating the only P2P LeagueSync fantasy football wagering platform to the first platform where players could place custom parlays on any combination of Polymarket predictions, Verse has always innovated on the edges.
Despite this announcement, there has never been a better time to be in the prediction market business. It just looks a little different now. For this next chapter, the company needs less operator and more technologist.
That is why I am handing it off to my longtime best friend and co-founder David Rosen. He's leading the new Verse Capital operation as Managing Director.
David is exactly the technologist to lead the development of trading innovations. I am extremely confident in his leadership and continue to assist him as an advisor to Verse Capital. I remain on the Board of the company.
Now, my new chapter.
If betting markets are now federally legitimate and globally liquid then the data flowing through them is no longer just market noise.
It’s intelligence.
That is the venture I am announcing today.
I have co-founded Betting Intelligence alongside Sean Guillory, PhD, and Gary Morland.
Betting Intelligence is a private intelligence firm dedicated to the extraction of real-time signals intelligence from betting markets.
I serve the company as the Chief Intelligence Officer and Board member.
Together, we are founders of not only a company but also a concept.
Betting Intelligence (BETINT): The use of betting market behavior as an intelligence signal of intent, insider knowledge, and pending real-world action.
Through research and collaboration with academic and government partners, BETINT is pioneering a new discipline of intelligence.
It joins a class of disciplines used by government agencies and analysts across the world: OSINT, HUMINT, SIGINT, and now BETINT.
Why Now
People are already noticing the utility of betting intelligence.
Read our feature in last week’s New York Times.
A few weeks ago, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against a 17-year U.S. Army master sergeant assigned to support Joint Special Operations Command. He had placed roughly $34,000 across 13 Polymarket contracts tied to the capture of Nicolás Maduro.
When Operation Absolute Resolve went live, he pocketed more than $409,000. He is now charged with wire fraud, commodities fraud, and theft of nonpublic government information. It is the first criminal insider trading case ever brought against a U.S. prediction market trader.
This is the kind of behavior BETINT’s system catches.
We give analysts, risk teams, and government partners who already work in threat intelligence a tool that treats betting markets the way they have always treated cables, signals, and open-source feeds - as a discipline.
The Product
BETINT.ai is an intelligence terminal providing the premiere experience for analysts, risk teams, and government stakeholders to track global betting markets.
Clients can deploy AI agents that monitor price movement, detect whale trades, generate wallet forensic reports, and surface clustered syndicate activity in real time.
BETINT agents track traders in real time and follow patterns only custom-trained computers can decipher.
The BETINT platform gives clients a custom suite of tracking technologies built to address four core questions:
You can read more about BETINT.ai’s feature set here.
Alongside strategic government partners, BETINT works closely with media, research, academic, and intelligence collaborators.
Why Me
This venture is personal for me.
During the past several years, much of my family has lived in Israel. I found myself relying on what prediction markets were saying to understand the danger my own family was in.
Were they a perfect system? No.
But they had real intelligence value to me as a concerned brother and son. When I saw those same war markets begin to be openly manipulated, I quickly understood that the intelligence value of these markets could appeal to far more than just myself.
This role is also particularly meaningful for me because it allows me to follow, in my own way, in the footsteps of my father, David Zimmermann.
His decades of service in the military and defense community create a reputation I can only strive to live up to. I am proud to say he is working alongside Betting Intelligence as an advisor and partner. We are truly in business together as father and son.
Don’t Fall Behind
Our presentation at a private threatcasting conference hosted at the McCain Institute in Washington, D.C. to an audience of government and private-sector security professionals only further validated our research.
We have developed ongoing strategic relationships with stakeholders across the government and private landscape.
I have also co-written several pieces on the topic of BETINT alongside my co-founders. If you only read one, read the primer: The Dawn of Betting Intelligence.
It gives a bird’s-eye view of the discipline and the threat vectors that the new age of online digital markets creates.
Two more, if you want to go deeper:
Why Every Prediction Market Carries the Risk of Violence (a.k.a. Assassination Semantics), on how markets that look innocent can quietly become death markets.
Poly Pump Fake, on the psychological-operations potential of fake-out market moves by bad actors, state actors, and for profit trolls
I am proud to unveil this new venture to my network. If you would like to connect on the topic of Betting Intelligence and the emerging threat capabilities that prediction markets pose, reach out to me at dan@betint.ai.
If your organization needs technology to monitor global betting markets 24/7, visit bettingintelligence.ai and get in touch.
A final note. BETINT is one of two ventures I am bringing into the light this week. I’ll have more on that in a future post.