MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Sports betting should be regulated as a federal financial product rather than a state-licensed casino product, two panelists said Thursday.
At Consensus Miami 2026, Jacob Fortinsky, co-founder and CEO of sports betting platform Novig, said the old sports betting model is structurally broken because it treats winning bettors like cheaters.
“Sports betting is really the only industry in the country that regularly limits and bans its power users,” Fortinsky said. He presented sporting event contracts as binary financial instruments that “have been treated for so long as a gaming product and should instead be treated as a financial product.” Globally, he said, sports betting is “a $2 trillion asset class still dominated by these legacy casinos.”
Adam Mastrelli, founder of 57 Maiden, a company that builds AI-based trading strategies for predictive markets, validated the criticism through personal experience.
“My partner and I were kicked out of two major sportsbooks within two months of trading because we were sharp,” he said. It’s like “LeBron James was kicked out of the NBA because he was too good,” he added.
Mastrelli said the team turned to Novig, which he said charges no fees and allows traders to create synthetic positions.
Mastrelli said his company’s advantage has deteriorated rapidly and that out of 154 trading strategies offered, only three are currently operating profitably.
“That advantage is going to disappear,” he said, “so if you can build systems that can track that advantage and that alpha… then it becomes really, really intriguing.” His most profitable season, he said, was the WNBA.
Fortinsky said Novig is on track to transition this summer from a live sweepstakes model in 35 states to a federal DCM framework that would allow it to operate in all 50 states. An earlier attempt at regulation at the state level in Colorado, he said, was a wake-up call. “Regulators have told us that you are naive if you think we care about consumer protection, innovation or market efficiency. In reality, we only care about our tax revenue,” he said.
The federal-state fight, Fortinsky added, “is going to end up in the Supreme Court in the next two or three years,” with 15 lawsuits underway between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Kalshi, Robinhood and various states. Within prediction markets, he argued that sports is “counter-intuitive, in fact, the safest vertical,” given the greatest concerns around insider trading and manipulation around political and event deals.
Mastrelli, who said he avoids offshore platforms altogether, compared prediction markets to stock exchanges: “When I see a robust stock market now, it’s AQR versus SIG. It’s not going away.”
