Why I'm building Social Parlay

I came to golf late, in my thirties, with no family history in the game and no idea what I was doing. I got hooked anyway.

My first proper rounds were with Kris and Gilly [where, roughly when]. I thought we were playing golf. They were running a market. There was a Nassau agreed on the first tee, skins, somebody pressing on the back nine, and all of it lived on the corner of a scorecard and in someone's head. We settled at the bar afterwards. [One true detail: what got argued about, forgotten, or paid late.]

I had spent seven years on trading floors at JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, building the systems that turn a dozen market data feeds into one price. I knew what I was looking at. Prices set by people with real knowledge of the course and of each other, positions, a settlement. It was a market with no software.

Every group I have played with since does the same thing. Golfers don't need to be taught to bet. What they have never had is a place to do it together.

So in 2020 we built one: an app for golf friend groups to run their games. About 200 people used it, and they liked it on Saturday. Then the round ended and there was nothing to do until the next one. A friend group only has action when it plays. The app went quiet midweek, and we shut it down. We kept the lesson: the room needs a market that is always open.

Professional golf is that market. There is a tournament almost every week, four days long, with a new price on every shot. In April 2026 one tournament traded $545 million on a single exchange. But it happened the way trading usually happens: alone, anonymous, one contract at a time, with 84 percent of the money in a single market. The exchanges have the market and no room. We had the room and no market.

Social Parlay is both. Your group gets a clubhouse: a private space with chat, everyone's positions and a leaderboard. From Thursday to Sunday you trade the Tour, against each other and against everyone else on the platform. On Saturday morning you run your own game. Inviting a friend is a link in the group chat.

We built the hard part first. From 2024, with Jason Lee leading the Solana work and Jared Clark arguing with all of us until the decision holds, we rebuilt from the market up: a peer-to-peer order book, live golf data from more than one source, escrow and settlement on-chain. Funds sit in custodial escrow, and we say so, because holding other people's money is the part of this business that deserves the most scrutiny. I learned that in the eight years after the trading floors, building consumer products, including a Bitcoin wallet. We never take the other side of a trade.

It runs end to end on devnet today, clubhouses included. Mainnet is 2027, outside the US and Canada first, geofenced from day one, with counsel signed off before launch.

Social Parlay is golf and it stays golf. The engine underneath, which we call Arcline, can carry other sports, and each of those will be its own product for its own fans. Golf has to win first.

If your group already has a game on Saturday, this was built for you.