FanDuel and DraftKings both stopped offering CME sports event contracts at least a month ago, ahead of the product class being retired Friday, yet the exchange still regularly reports more daily volume than it did through the spring.
According to an August filing, CME will stop offering sports and cultural event contracts after Friday. That would make the exchange the second to fold on sports event contracts, after ForecastEx.
FanDuel has not offered any sports trades from CME in a month, InGame has learned, while DraftKings stopped offering CME sports contracts even earlier.
Yet sports volume has remained in the millions of dollars in recent weeks, almost half of the platform’s peak during the early stages of the FIFA World Cup, and higher than April and May, when FanDuel Predicts was sending all of its volume to CME.
That volume is still a tiny fraction of the volume on Kalshi, which routinely tops a billion dollars a day, but is unusually strong for an exchange that is no longer accessible from its only two known distribution partners.
Baseball dominates remaining sports volume
Notably, almost all of the sports volume on CME is on baseball. Football game markets attracted no volume whatsoever, even during the first two NFL games of the season, while football “team” markets — which would include season-long team win bets — attracted only a few hundred dollars.
Volume on baseball games has also consistently been exact multiples of $1,000, which would not be expected if the trading was from regular retail bettors.
One possible explanation is market makers closing out positions, but most of the trades are on individual baseball games, where it would be unlikely that market makers would have already racked up positions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for several games per day.
CME’s place in prediction market world
DraftKings and FanDuel still offer non-sports event contracts from CME, such as contracts on the price of Bitcoin or how high the S&P 500 Index will reach on a given day.
CME, as a giant of traditional commodity futures, has been attempting to figure out its place in the world of prediction markets. It partnered with FanDuel and DraftKings in 2025 and began offering sports contracts, but its CEO Terry Duffy has been an outspoken opponent of many types of prediction market contracts.
He said that parlay contracts — which CME self-certified, but never listed — are “not markets” in a July earnings call. In a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Duffy said that many types of contract, particularly “mention” markets, were susceptible to manipulation. In a CFTC roundtable last month, he said that “individual-based” sports event contracts are “being manipulated” and clashed with Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara.
FanDuel Predicts is a futures commission merchant (FCM), meaning that it is not an exchange in its own right but can direct its customers toward different exchanges, and is 51%-owned by CME. In April, FanDuel submitted an application for an FCM that would be wholly owned by the betting operator, but it has not yet been approved. In June, FanDuel started offering contracts from Crypto.com too and soon used that exchange for all of its sports contracts.
DraftKings Predictions, also an FCM, originally sent all volume to CME, but began offering Crypto.com contracts in December, and then its own in-house exchange DKeX in June.
