Menu #6: Prediction Markets, People Skills & Protocol Fragility

Prediction Markets
How to Win friends And Influence People
Web3 Dinner Club: April (LDN)
The Drift Protocol Hack
Novel Labs
Brand spice
Chefs Note

This is The Menu.

The UK Web3 operator’s weekly briefing:

What founders, investors, and builders are actually discussing behind closed doors.

This week we explore three timely threads:

The explosive rise of prediction markets, Dale Carnegie’s timeless lessons on human relationships, and the brutal $285m Drift Protocol hack alongside the quiet rise of local-currency stablecoins.

Together they point to one core question for 2026:

What will trust, relationships, and operational resilience mean for value and growth in Web3?

In this issue:

Signal, served weekly.

This month’s dinner is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.

Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.

If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.

A prediction market lets people trade on the outcome of future events — elections, interest rates, sports, geopolitics, cultural moments, and more.

Each contract pays out $1 if the event happens and $0 if it doesn’t.

The current price therefore acts as the market’s real-time probability estimate.

A contract trading at £0.72 implies a 72% chance the outcome occurs.

You can buy or sell at any time as new information arrives, so prices update continuously.

Why it matters:
With real money at stake, noise gets filtered and incentives align toward accuracy. Prediction markets often deliver sharper forecasts than polls or pundits.

One-line summary:
Prediction markets = real-time crowd forecasts, powered by skin in the game.

Prediction markets let anyone put real money behind their beliefs about future events

“Will this candidate win?”
“Will the Fed cut rates?”
“Will a specific geopolitical flashpoint ignite?”

With prices dynamically reflecting collective probability.

The two dominant platforms:

Polymarket (crypto-native, on-chain)
Kalshi (CFTC-regulated, fiat-friendly)

Have become the clearest real-time sentiment dashboards in finance and politics.

In March 2026 alone, the sector exploded: approximately $25.7 billion in monthly notional volume. (up ~2,800% year-over-year), nearly 191 million transactions, and hundreds of thousands of active participants.

A single day on Polymarket hit a record $425 million in volume during peak Iran-related tension. What started as a crypto curiosity is now processing more daily action than many traditional asset classes.

But the boom has brought intense scrutiny.

Suspiciously well-timed bets including a $400k+ payout on the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and multi-million-dollar wins on Iran conflict escalations have triggered insider-trading concerns.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are reportedly examining whether some traders used non-public information, while both platforms rushed to introduce stricter surveillance, account restrictions for insiders, and enhanced market integrity rules in late March.

On the regulatory front, it’s federal vs. state warfare. The CFTC (under Chairman Michael Selig) has sued Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois, arguing that state attempts to label prediction markets as illegal gambling “nullify federal law” and overstep into CFTC-exclusive jurisdiction over event contracts.

At the same time, bipartisan bills in Congress including the “Prediction Markets are Gambling Act” seek to ban or heavily restrict contracts on sports, elections, war, and “death” events.

Institutional interest is surging regardless. Kalshi recently raised fresh capital at a $22 billion valuation, while the Intercontinental Exchange (parent of the NYSE) deepened its commitment to Polymarket with a multi-hundred-million-dollar investment.

Major League Baseball became Polymarket’s exclusive partner, and mainstream outlets like CNN and CNBC now regularly feature their odds.

Prediction markets are evolving from simple betting venues into powerful, crowd-sourced forecasting mechanisms and, increasingly, into programmable on-chain primitives that could sit alongside tokenised stocks and AI agents in the future of money.

Signal:

Prediction markets are no longer fringe, they’re a high-stakes arena where information, capital, regulation, and real-world events collide in real time.

The most interesting action (and value creation) is shifting from pure politics into macro, geopolitics, and eventually on-chain economic primitives.

Most networking advice today feels like tactical hacks or LinkedIn performance art.

Dale Carnegie’s 1936 classic cuts through all that with something far simpler and more powerful: timeless principles for making people genuinely like you, trust you, and want to help you.

I first read the book in November 2017, fresh out of starting my law degree.

Since then, I’ve returned to it almost every year — not always cover-to-cover, but to certain chapters that never lose their power.

In an industry built on relationships, capital, and influence, consciously thinking about how you interact with people and how you’re perceived remains one of the highest-leverage skills any founder or operator can develop.

The book is built around four parts:

At its core, the message is disarmingly human: people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Stop criticising, start appreciating.

Stop arguing to prove you’re right, and start making the other person feel important.

The ideas that stick hardest for founders and operators:

Yes, the language is old-school and the examples are dated. But the underlying psychology hasn’t changed one bit. In an industry full of sharp technical talent and big egos, the ability to make people feel heard and valued remains one of the highest-leverage skills any founder or operator can develop.

This isn’t a book about manipulation it’s about becoming the kind of person others naturally want to support. In Web3, where capital, talent, and partnerships move on relationships as much as on technology, that edge matters.

The bit I didn’t really like (but probably needed):

It can feel overly idealistic at times. Not every situation rewards pure warmth, and some negotiations require harder edges. Still, if you apply even half the principles consistently, you’ll notice the difference in rooms, raises, and hires.

Best for:
Anyone who attends events, raises capital, builds teams, or simply wants better relationships which, let’s be honest, is most of us in this space.

A founder lesson worth keeping on your desk:
“Success in life is 85% people skills and 15% technical knowledge but most of us spend 100% of our time on the 15%.”

Most networking events optimise for volume.

Not signal.

Too many conversations that go nowhere.

This is designed differently.

The Web3 Dinner Club is a curated, seated dinner for founders, investors, and operators building in crypto, AI, and frontier tech in the UK.

One table (or two). No noise. Just people worth knowing.

Over the past 3 years:

• 25+ dinners
• 230+ curated members
• Outcomes → hires, partnerships, capital

This isn’t about “meeting people.”

It’s about getting in the right rooms consistently.

We keep this intentionally small.
Not everyone gets a seat.

Proudly Sponsored by Novel Labs.

April 1, 2026, will be remembered as one of the most expensive days in crypto history — and it wasn’t an April Fools’ joke.

Solana’s largest decentralised perpetuals exchange, Drift Protocol, suffered a devastating $285 million exploit in roughly 12 minutes.

What started as a seemingly routine day on the chain turned into the biggest DeFi hack of 2026 (and the second-largest in Solana’s history).

The attack wasn’t a classic smart contract bug. It was a sophisticated governance and operational takeover.

Attackers allegedly used a combination of:

Once in control, they rewrote risk parameters, removed limits, and drained major vaults including JLP delta-neutral, SOL super staking, and BTC super staking positions. Most of the stolen funds (primarily USDC, SOL, JLP, and WBTC) were quickly swapped and bridged to Ethereum via Circle’s CCTP, making tracing and freezing far more difficult.

TRM Labs and other analysts have pointed to tactics and timing consistent with North Korean-linked actors (Lazarus Group / UNC4736), continuing a pattern of high-value, state-sponsored crypto heists. The protocol’s TVL cratered from over $550M to under $250M almost instantly. The $DRIFT token dropped as much as 37-42% in the aftermath.

This hack stings because it highlights a painful truth we keep relearning: in DeFi, the weakest link is often not the code. It’s key management, multisig hygiene, social engineering, and operational security.

Drift had a Security Council for a reason. Yet sophisticated adversaries spent weeks (or months) preparing deploying tokens, testing nonces, and likely targeting human elements. It’s a reminder that “decentralised” doesn’t automatically mean “unstoppable” when admin privileges can still create single (or multi) points of failure.

For our dinner club community whether you’re running a protocol, managing treasury multisigs, or just holding positions key takeaways:

Drift’s team has been transparent so far, updating the multisig and working with security firms. The broader Solana DeFi ecosystem is resilient, but trust takes a hit every time capital vanishes this dramatically.

The house always has an edge… but in crypto, sometimes the house gets robbed in broad daylight.

Stay safe out there!

People don’t just consume information differently, they process it differently. And when you’re drowning in content, the hardest part isn’t finding “more”… it’s finding signal in a format that actually sticks.

That’s why we like Information Is Beautiful.

They’re an independent collective turning messy topics into clear, sourced infographics and data visuals, interactive graphics, stories, and even live performances and books.

It’s built for people who want the gist fast, without losing the truth: distilled insights, proper data, and visuals that make complex ideas easy to understand and share.

For builders, it’s a useful reminder: in a world of hot takes, clarity is a competitive advantage, and the right visual can communicate what a thousand words can’t.

Stablecoins started as crypto tools. Now they’re starting to look like payments infrastructure.

In Beyond Dollarization, Dune (with Visa) shows how local-currency stablecoins are quietly becoming a practical workaround for cross-border friction, moving local money instantly, outside banking hours, without routing everything through USD rails.

The data points to a shift from speculation to operational settlement (payroll, supplier payments, remittances, treasury flows).

If you want a grounded, numbers-backed view of where this is heading, read the report:

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Until next time