Haute Living Executive Q&A – Safebets’ Alex Konanykhin Predicts The Future Of The Prediction Marketplace ‘A.G.’

1. You were born and started your career in Russia before building companies across very different regulatory and business environments. How did those early experiences shape your views on markets, trust, and financial systems—and ultimately your approach to entrepreneurship?

Nobody is born confident. Confidence is earned—one success at a time.

Mine was earned the hard way. By the age of 25, I had built the largest commercial bank in Russia from scratch, in a country that had no modern banking industry when I started. That experience taught me something that has stayed with me ever since: audacious goals are not reserved for other people.

That’s why I’m now going after two targets most people would dismiss as unrealistic.

The first is to disrupt the global prediction market industry with my Risk-Free Betting platform called SafeBets.world.

The second is to create the world’s largest brokerage operation on crypto, commodities, stocks, or currency markets by leveraging the collective intelligence of SafeBets’s expert forecasters.

I understand how grandiose those objectives sound. Very few people would seriously attempt either one, let alone both. But I’m not pursuing them on bravado. I’m pursuing them because I have the confidence, experience, and credibility I obtained by achieving market dominance in Russia.

2. What was the original problem you set out to solve with Unicoin, and how did that idea evolve as you navigated U.S. regulatory scrutiny and the broader “war on crypto” narrative?

I decided to launch Unicoin at the end of 2021, and the timing was no accident.

That year, two “dog coins” that had started as parodies—Dogecoin and Shiba Inu—reached a combined all-time-high valuation of $132 billion. Let me repeat that: $132 billion, for two jokes.

To me, the signal was unmistakable. Institutional money was about to flow into the crypto sector in a serious way—and institutional players were not going to be satisfied with the options on the table. They were never going to allocate portfolios to dog coins, monkey coins, frog coins, or other meme tokens with no fundamentals. Institutional and traditional investors would demand something they could actually underwrite: a cryptocurrency with the transparency, governance, and asset backing.

So I launched Unicoin to be exactly that: an institutional-grade cryptocurrency—the first fully audited and publicly reporting crypto company in the United States, backed by a large portfolio of real-world assets, and run by top experts in finance and technology.

Unlike other cryptocurrency companies, we followed all applicable securities regulations to the letter – and had passed through two exhaustive SEC investigations with flying colors.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Alex Konanykhin

3. You’ve often positioned Unicoin in contrast to enforcement-heavy crypto regulation. Looking back, what have been the most defining moments in your relationship with regulators, and how have those shaped your strategy for building the company today?

Investors loved Unicoin.

By early 2024, we had raised over $100 million in cash and signed more than $3 billion in real-estate-for-Unicoin swap agreements—outperforming all cryptocurrencies combined in the pre-ICO stage. When we announced our upcoming listing on the New York Stock Exchange and major crypto exchanges, the message to the market was clear: a compliant, transparent, institutional-grade cryptocurrency was no longer a concept. It was happening.

That’s the moment the regulators made us their primary target.

Under the chairmanship of Gary Gensler, the SEC was on a mission to destroy the U.S. crypto industry—and Unicoin, as the most compliant and visible company in the sector, became the showcase target in its notorious War on Crypto.

Gensler’s henchmen tried to bully us into shutting down our operations or moving them out of the United States.

They picked the wrong founder.

If I had wanted to be pushed around by corrupt officials, I would have stayed in Russia.

Instead, I chose the same thing I’ve chosen every other time a government tried to run me over: I’m going to fight—for our investors, for the integrity of American capital markets, and for the principle that regulators do not get to destroy compliant businesses to cover for their own failed agenda. And I intend to expose this conspiracy in court, in full daylight, with every document and every witness the law allows.

I’ve litigated with the U.S. government five times. I’ve won all five cases. Now going for six out of six.

4. The Unicoin Foundation represents a shift toward education, inclusion, and “crypto for good.” What prompted that pivot, and how do you see the role of foundations and mission-driven structures in legitimizing crypto long-term?

A new era at the SEC has opened a path forward for Unicoin.

The new SEC Chairman, Paul Atkins, is working to undo the tremendous damage his disgraced predecessor, Gary Gensler, inflicted on the U.S. crypto industry during years of regulatory overreach. In November 2025, Chairman Atkins announced a long-overdue clarification: the SEC will no longer treat cryptocurrencies as securities unless the issuer promises essential managerial efforts that would lead investors to expect profits from those efforts.

This is a landmark decision—one that restores the original, common-sense interpretation of the Howey Test and ends the Gensler-era practice of treating nearly every digital asset as a security by default.

For Unicoin, this ruling is a double-edged sword.

On the bright side, Chairman Atkins’ policy gives Unicoin a clear, fully compliant path forward. The regulatory uncertainty that the previous SEC weaponized against us has been replaced by bright-line rules that we can—and will—operate within, completely and transparently.

On the other hand, the same policy means that Unicoin Inc., as the issuer, can no longer participate in providing the essential managerial efforts that were previously central to the company’s role.

To comply with Chairman Atkins’ new framework while ensuring Unicoin continues to grow in visibility and value, we established the Unicoin Foundation—a decentralized governance body controlled by the Unicoin community.

Unicoin holders have elected a board of 27 directors to steer strategy on their behalf. These directors are now free to pursue whatever initiatives they deem most effective to build the Unicoin brand, expand adoption, and grow the coin’s value—unconstrained by the issuer-side limitations that now apply to Unicoin Inc.

Essential managerial efforts now flow from the holders of the token, for the benefit of the coin holders—exactly as the new SEC framework envisions and exactly as a truly decentralized cryptocurrency should operate.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Alex Konanykhin

5. With SafeBets, you’re now entering prediction markets and AI-driven collective intelligence. What excites you most about this space, and how does it connect to your broader thesis about decentralization, information, and financial participation?

People love gambling. There’s no point pretending otherwise. It brings excitement into their lives. A sports game is twice as interesting to watch when you have something at stake

But people don’t love what gambling does to them. Gambling creates addiction. It destroys families. It empties retirement accounts. It drains savings that took decades to build.

That’s not an abstraction—it’s a public-health catastrophe happening in plain sight, in every country in the world, protected by an industry that profits from exactly the outcomes that ruin its customers.

What I’ve built with SafeBets is risk-free betting at large scale.

That one phrase sounds almost contradictory, but it isn’t—it’s the whole point. You get the excitement, the engagement, the skill, the stakes that make predicting outcomes feel alive. What you don’t get is the possibility of losing money you can’t afford to lose. No one is going to empty their savings on SafeBets. No one’s family is going to be destroyed by it. No one is going to jump out of a window because of a bet placed on our platform.

And on top of that, SafeBets creates something extraordinary on the upside. People who genuinely understand a domain—who build the best algorithms, who develop rare knowledge, who can consistently outperform the majority of other predictors—will be able to earn tens of millions of dollars on SafeBets.world. Without ever risking a penny of their own money.

That has never existed before.

What excites me most about this space is that we can finally give people the upside of betting without the downside. The excitement without the destruction. The earning opportunity without the risk of ruin. If we get this right, SafeBets won’t just be a successful brokerage. It will be one of the few places in the modern economy where millions of people can build real wealth by being smart, disciplined, and right—rather than lucky, reckless, and eventually wiped out.

That is worth building.