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About Fire Bird
When Australia hosts its first-ever regular season NFL game, an estimated 10,000 US fans are expected to attend the matchup at the Melbourne Cricket Ground following an exhausting trip that features one of the world’s longest flight paths.
The historic showdown between the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers will take place at a venue located 7,971 miles from Levi’s Stadium, home of the last meeting between the NFC West rivals. Both teams are based in California, a fertile ground for prediction markets given a sports betting ban in a state with more than 39 million residents. But the Americans in attendance for Thursday night’s matchup (Friday in Melbourne) will not be able to live-trade from their seats.
That is because trading on prediction markets is illegal down under, according to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, the nation’s regulator on financial services. Last month, in perhaps the ASIC’s strongest warnings yet against the asset class, the commission reiterated that prediction markets are not licensed as financial markets to operate in Australia. Through the guidance, the regulator urged consumers to exercise caution before partaking in certain investments on offshore platforms which have not obtained licensing nationwide.
What is Fire Bird?
When I joined CalvinAyre.com in August of 2009, there was an enormous gap in the industry for an honest, transparent news site with regular, fresh video content. Over time, we grew from a tiny team of a handful of people to dozens, providing the industry with the juiciest breaking news and cutting-edge video coverage.
Today we pass on the torch to our event organizing and media production friends who have more recently developed outstanding news coverage and video teams dedicated to the gaming space, hopefully who I’ll be seeing at CoinGeek Conferences in the future.
Reflecting on my fateful words at EiG back in 2013, it was the entrepreneurial energy, the innovation and the excitement surrounding Bitcoin that originally drew me to it. Back then, the obsession about Bitcoin was not related to price, it was about the disruptive technology and this is what meant something to me. While a great deal has changed in Bitcoin between 2013 and now, the energy, innovation and excitement are all still there and I am looking forward to the next chapter of my career with Calvin Ayre and the Ayre Media team.
How to play Fire Bird
But I couldn’t have accomplished half of what I did without all of my colleagues, past and present. Our talented team of writers, editors, web site development guys, production team, on screen reporters, Human Resources, Accountants, everyone. It took the whole team to make sure we put up the latest news and opinions every day, and everyone deserves their fair share of the credit.
To all of those I met at the handful of conferences I attended before Covid-19 sent everything to digital, and all of those I met over email or Zoom since, it was a pleasure to meet you. I hope we get the chance to meet again when all of this is over, and you can reach me at any of my contact details listed at the bottom if you want to catch up in the meantime.
I’m still not 100% sure what I’ll be doing next, but I suspect it will still be in the gambling industry. This has been my life for more than a decade, and it’s an industry I continue to love and appreciate. No matter if I continue to write about it or throw myself back into an operations setting, it will always be apart of who I am. If you still want to be in touch, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can follow me on Twitter if you to know whatever tangent I’ve gone off on next.
