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SportsTranscript
00:00But this prediction market story that we're just hammering home every single day here on Newswire, you guys are writing about it over on Legal Sports Report.
00:08Prediction markets, not sports betting markets, but companies that are doing something similar and you can bet on them by making predictions.
00:17I mean, this this Sam has got to come to a head soon.
00:20I cannot imagine that now that I believe it's FanDuel that say, hey, we're going to get into the prediction markets, too, meaning that all of a sudden, Sam, it's plausible that we have what appears to be legitimate sports betting going on from companies that say that they're not providing sports betting.
00:39I mean, something's got to give here.
00:42Yeah, it's one of the most interesting developments happening in our industry right now.
00:46And a lot of that pressure is mounting from people saying, hey, if you're not going to call it sports betting, it's not going to have any of the protections that we worked tirelessly for years on to get in with sports betting.
01:01And you have these companies like Robinhood, Kalshi and Crypto.com, essentially just whenever they want to launching new markets.
01:09They just started doing money line and spread markets on the NBA before the playoffs.
01:14And that's caught the attention of the NBA, which actually wrote to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to be the federal entity that regulates these type of markets.
01:26The NBA wrote them saying this is a threat to the integrity of the game because it doesn't have any of these protections that we have for sports books.
01:35These are companies that handled over 500 million dollars on March Madness.
01:40Now, 80 percent of their volume on an average weekend is on sports compared to what they used to offer only, which was markets like who's going to be the next pope, markets like what's the weather going to be like tomorrow, who's going to win the election.
01:54And they actually recently made a filing with the CFTC telling them we intend to launch player prop markets soon.
02:03Those are, you know, as everyone who watches this show probably knows, bets on the performances of individual athletes.
02:11I wouldn't be surprised if they rolled that out before a big event like the NBA finals.
02:15And the NBA is saying, you know, those don't have any of the protections that actually warning that what's next, like, could you soon bet on an injury happening during a game?
02:26Could you bet on an officiating decision?
02:28There's a lot of integrity concerns that come with that.
02:31There's no age verification for these platforms.
02:34There's no monitoring of crazy money that comes in last moment.
02:38That's how the NBA caught Jonte Porter.
02:40All of a sudden, there was tons of money coming in on his player props at licensed sportsbooks.
02:46And the NBA knew that because it works with the sportsbooks.
02:48The NBA doesn't work with prediction markets and companies like Calci.
02:52So you could have hundreds of millions of dollars coming in on, you know, whether or not LeBron's going to score 24 points tonight.
02:59And there's really no mechanism in place to protect it right now.
03:03Now, the NBA is being clear.
03:04It doesn't want it's not asking to stop these prediction markets from operating.
03:09It's merely telling the CFTC, hey, if you're going to allow this, we need some guardrails urgently.
03:14We want to be part of that process.
03:16And again, the CFTC hasn't really said anything about this issue.
03:19They were supposed to hold a roundtable, which was going to kind of, you know, get all the ducks in a row last month.
03:25It got pushed back and then indefinitely canceled.
03:27And the executive of FanDuel actually just said yesterday, he wasn't even sure that it was going to happen in the first place.
03:34So a lot of uncertainty about what the CFTC is going to do.
03:38They have a lot of the current administration has a lot of ties to Calci and these companies.
03:42So like you said, Craig, it's all going to come to a head soon.
03:45It's just a matter of when.
03:47But in the meantime, everyone's raising the red flags.
03:49It's just a matter of when.