MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - Sports betting should be regulated as a federal financial product rather than a state-licensed gambling activity, two industry executives argued Thursday at Consensus Miami 2026.
Jacob Fortinsky, co-founder and CEO of Novig, a sports betting platform, said traditional sportsbooks are structurally broken because they limit or ban successful bettors. He says sports event contracts are effectively binary financial instruments and should be treated as such. Globally, sports betting is a $2 trillion asset class still dominated by legacy casinos.
Adam Mastrelli, founder of 57 Maiden, a firm that builds AI-driven trading strategies for prediction markets, said he and his partner were banned from two major sportsbooks within two months simply for being "sharp"-comparable, he said, to LeBron James getting kicked out of the NBA for being too good.
Mastrelli noted his firm's edge decays quickly-of 154 proposed strategies, only three currently run profitably-and he called prediction markets akin to equities exchanges. His most profitable season was the WNBA.
Fortinsky said Novig plans to transition this summer from a sweepstakes model in 35 states to a federal Designated Contract Market (DCM) framework covering all 50 states. He expects the battle over federal versus state regulation to reach the Supreme Court within two to three years, with 15 pending cases involving the CFTC, Kalshi, Robinhood, and various states.
He argued that sports betting is "counterintuitively the safest vertical" for prediction markets because political and event-driven contracts pose greater insider trading and manipulation risks.