MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Sports betting must be regulated as a federal monetary product reasonably than a state-licensed on line casino product, two panelists mentioned Thursday.
Showing at Consensus Miami 2026, Jacob Fortinsky, co-founder and CEO of sports activities betting platform Novig, mentioned the legacy sportsbook mannequin is structurally damaged as a result of it treats profitable bettors as cheaters.
“Sports betting is really the only industry in the country that regularly limits and bans their power users,” Fortinsky mentioned. He framed sports activities occasion contracts as binary monetary devices that “for so long have been treated as a gambling product and instead should really be treated as a financial product.” Globally, he mentioned, sports activities betting is “a $2 trillion asset class still dominated by these legacy casinos.”
Adam Mastrelli, founding father of 57 Maiden, a agency that builds AI-driven buying and selling methods for prediction markets, validated the critique with private expertise.
“My partner and I got kicked off of two big sportsbooks within two months of trading because we were sharp,” he mentioned, It is like “LeBron James getting kicked out of the NBA for being too good,” he added.
Mastrelli mentioned the crew turned to Novig, which he mentioned expenses no charges and permits merchants to create artificial positions.
Mastrelli mentioned his agency’s edge decayed shortly, and of 154 proposed buying and selling methods, solely three at the moment run profitably.
“This edge will go away,” he mentioned, “so if you can build systems that can keep up with that edge and that alpha… then it becomes really, really intriguing.” His most worthwhile season, he mentioned, was the WNBA.
Fortinsky mentioned Novig is on observe to transition this summer time from a sweepstakes mannequin reside in 35 states to a federal DCM framework that can let it function in all 50 states. An earlier try to be regulated on the state degree in Colorado, he mentioned, was a wake-up name. “Regulators told us essentially you’re naive if you think we care about consumer protection or innovation or market efficiency. We really just care about our tax revenue,” he mentioned.
The federal-state combat, Fortinsky added, is “going to get to the Supreme Court in the next two or three years,” with 15 pending lawsuits between the Commodity Futures Buying and selling Fee, Kalshi, Robinhood and varied states. Inside prediction markets, he argued sports activities is “counterintuitively actually the safest vertical,” given the larger insider-trading and manipulation issues round political and event-driven contracts.
Mastrelli, who mentioned he avoids offshore platforms solely, in contrast prediction markets to equities exchanges: “When I see a robust equities market now, this is AQR against SIG. It doesn’t go away.”
