Prediction markets are coming to sports in a big way. Heres what you need to know The Athletic

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BetMGM is one of the top-rated sportsbooks in the U.S. offering some of the best live betting odds in the industry. Other operators, barring a revenue surge, won’t reach the thresholds for higher brackets. Mississippi regulators and lawmakers have flirted with authorizing online sports betting repeatedly, most recently in January 2026, but it remains a casino-only state. I’ve been tracking the regulated U.S. sports betting market since New Jersey took the first post-PASPA wager in June 2018. “I think it’s an extension of the road that we’ve navigated with regulators for the last seven years,” King said. In an effort to appease the states that hold their gaming licenses, they are not offering sports markets (or, in some cases, any markets at all) in states that have legal sports betting.

Sportsbooks leave money on the table every day as they look to offset risk. We provide you with instant access to live odds from over 50 sportsbooks. Sportsbook Insider offers the industry’s most advanced live odds platform for the most sought after, market-setting sportsbooks. Most regulated online sportsbooks in the U.S. accept PayPal as a payment method, including our top options BetMGM, FanDuel, DraftKings, and Caesars Sportsbook.

I think it’s going to continue to be an ongoing conversation because obviously there are a lot of open legal questions and challenges.” “I think it’s an extension of the road that we’ve navigated with regulators for the last seven years,” Matt King, CEO of Fanatics Betting & Gaming, said. But for sportsbooks, getting into prediction markets means trying to carefully navigate their relationships with state regulators.

That may not be a tacit admission that prediction markets are betting, but at the very least, it’s a signal that the audiences share a lot of crossover. “We’ve been in this movie before, where there is an asset class that is moving faster than regulation,” Asaf Meir, founder and CEO of financial surveillance company Solidus Labs, told The Athletic. They are regulated as financial exchanges under the CFTC, which has federal jurisdiction, thus allowing prediction markets to operate in all 50 states. Sports are an essential part of these companies’ businesses because so much of the money comes from contracts that strongly resemble sports betting. By avoiding that language, prediction markets have woven themselves into a legal safe zone, where they are defined as futures markets rather than gambling companies.

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