As recently as December, people were predicting for 2026, and then a series of things happened that no one could have thought of in those predictions. My view is that the pace is actually going to hamper the ultimate growth of prediction markets. Some of the stakeholders get pretty spooked when things happen so fast. I think there’ll be a quicker reaction to those things. In the early days of post-PASPA, it took us a couple of years to get aggravated or for the aggravation of every other advertisement on Sundays being for sports betting when I’m trying to watch an NFL game.  

When will folks get fed up with just trying to watch this award show, where I don’t need this bar graph every time that says 74% of Americans think something or now it went down to 72%? I just don’t need that in my life. There is this divergence between a company in that space getting a very large valuation, which means there’s a belief that something can drive a significant amount of revenue, and yet juxtaposed against the casualness of ‘it’s just fun when I watch the award show and there are really no implications to that.’ 

Well, there are a lot of implications if there’s real money being earned. It’s not just for fun viewership necessarily if someone is doing that on purpose and making money off of it. There’s a weird dichotomy between the seriousness of investing in a company at a multi-billion dollar valuation and the portrayal of it being just for fun. 

But the reality of it has to come at some point. All that adds up to is it won’t be as smooth of a ride for these companies as they maybe think it will be. Whether some people call that backlash, it’s just the natural reactions to the events that transpire. If you get a $2bn evaluation or multi-billion dollar valuation for your company, you feel like you need to generate revenue and that spurs certain activities, which people react to.  

Even though there’s such interest here, just seeing it as often as they are might become excessive or could affect their activity as well. I think a lot of the manifestation in the sports betting cases we’ve seen, whether it was a European expansion of online gaming, certainly post-PASPA here, is the public reacting in such a way that they get motivated to make a case of it. That then gets picked up by regulators and legislators.  

There are still some people that call their state representatives or their congresspeople, and those voicemails get heard. If enough legislators and regulators see from their constituents that these things are of interest, they start to react or take action. The extra dimensions here are, if you call your state regulator, in this case it won’t do you any good because these aren’t regulated by the state. It’s just a sustainability issue.  

We wrote two research papers post-Covid-19 which really focused on that issue of sustainability in more of an industry sense. I believe it was John Acres who recently said you can’t take every last dime from every last customer. Your customer has to be sustainable, so how you treat them in those moments is important. If your business thesis is to bet on anything, anywhere, anytime and for any amount, that’s not congruent with a sustainable customer.  

We will inevitably hear stories of insider political trading, people who are throwing the game or purposely saying things in public forums because they know there’s a market that exists. We’ve seen this happen before. It feels inevitable it’ll happen again. The outcome of this will be a little different because, again, the dimensions and factors at play are different, but those linear sets of activities seem to happen every time. Here, they will most likely happen again.