Let’s do a little compare and contrast.
It’s been a little over 11 years — or roughly 7,325 years in gambling time — since FanDuel, DraftKings, and the rest of the daily fantasy sports industry were in the crosshairs of state regulators, attorneys general, and lawmakers at both the state and federal level.
The industry, which grew out of what amounted to a loophole in the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), was on the ropes. While the companies in the space were busy fighting one another for market share, they all faced the same extinction-level crisis.
“Jason Robins and I were not exactly best friends, but we had a common interest,” Nigel Eccles, one of FanDuel’s co-founders, told InGame. “We relentlessly competed with each other. But on legislative stuff, we had a 100 percent overlap in our interests and we knew that. If we didn’t come together, the real risk was that we both were going to lose. We were up against vested interests, casinos, lawmakers … a lot of people that didn’t want us to be successful. So it would have been crazy for us not to come together and fight this jointly.”
Which they did. They hired a national lobbyist in Jeremy Kudon, built out a coordinated legal and political strategy, and eventually got themselves legalized in 44 states.
“Look, we’re going to compete, we want to win, and we’d love to crush them,” Eccles recalls of the time. “But we don’t gain anything by damaging the sector by trying to gain some edge over each other.”
Peter Hammon, an attorney and advisor in the online gaming and sports betting industry, got his start during that 2015 DFS fight; in fact, it drew him into the industry as a law student. Looking back, what strikes him isn’t just that the DFS companies worked together. It’s how seriously they took the work.
“There seemed to be a respect for what came before, which was clearly there in 2015 and clearly isn’t there now,” Hammon told InGame. “There’s a complete lack of acknowledgement of the past legislative history, prior attempts from prediction markets when they were called sports betting exchanges or when they were called InTrade, or NADEX. Either in principle or practice, there’s no accountability to things that have happened before, which I find incredibly strange.”
Which brings us to today and, in a way, to the same fight with different combatants, a different product, and almost none of the same discipline.
No predictions here
It’s been a little over a year — or about 1,003 years in gambling-slash-trading time — since Kalshi started pushing hard into sports event contracts. Polymarket’s legal return to the U.S. came later, in late 2025, but the backlash showed up right on schedule. State regulators, attorneys general, and elected officials have been coming at both companies from every direction, arguing that these platforms are basically offering sports betting by any other name.
In recent weeks, the whole thing has gotten even messier, thanks to a wave of ugly press over Iran-related “death markets” on Polymarket that turned prediction markets from a regulatory fight into something that looked, to a whole lot of people, deeply gross. Kalshi is now facing a lawsuit tied to its own Khamenei market and members of Congress are openly talking about cracking down.
These companies, along with the roughly two dozen and counting that either already offer sports contracts or would very much like to, are operating in a space where the law has not so much created a loophole as left the back door swinging open.
Whatever you call these things — event contracts, prediction markets, financial products, magic beans — to the average person they look an awful lot like bets on sports. And that’s the real fight now: not over what they’re called, but over who gets to control them. The states say this is gambling and belongs under state gaming law, if at all. The companies say these are federally regulated derivatives under the CFTC’s umbrella. And until somebody draws an actual bright line, everybody’s going to keep sprinting through the gray area as fast as they can.
Given all that, you’d think there would be an industry-wide push to stay on point, stay on message, and present a united front. Much like FanDuel and DraftKings did all those years ago.
Well, not so much.
Come together, right now
Sure, there’s a trade group. The Coalition for Prediction Markets (CPM) includes five operators: Kalshi, Underdog, Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Robinhood.
Aaron Brogan, founder and managing attorney of Brogan Law, sees that as evidence the industry is at least trying to get its act together.
“Crypto.com as one leader and Kalshi on the other side came together and said we should have a trade group. They were 100 percent right, because that’s your one avenue to cooperate with your competitors without breaching antitrust law,” Brogan told InGame.
He pointed to the crypto industry’s own constellation of trade groups as a model, noting their leaders are in the White House regularly.
“Prediction markets need that too,” he said. “And I honestly think CPM will be that eventually.”
But “eventually” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Because the problem isn’t just that CPM is incomplete. It’s that the industry itself appears structurally incapable of moving as one.
Start with the obvious: Polymarket isn’t part of CPM. The group didn’t respond to a pair of emailed invites to chat. Nor is there a phone number on its website. And the two highest-profile names in the space — the Joe Q. Public and Sen. Joe Q. Public most likely to associate with prediction markets — are not merely unaligned. They actively dislike each other.
For proof, look no further than NPR’s take on the situation. The headline kind of gave away the plot: “2 young billionaires are behind the prediction market boom. They hate each other.”
And the bad blood isn’t just personal; it’s baked into the product. Kalshi says trading on insider information is illegal and immoral; Polymarket has essentially treated insider information as part of the appeal. Kalshi is staunchly anti-death markets; Polymarket is decidedly not. Polymarket is a crypto-based exchange where users are anonymous; Kalshi uses old-fashioned things like American dollars.
Yet they both call themselves prediction markets. They are drawing scrutiny from many of the same legal and political observers. And they still are not aligned.
Nothingburger?
Now, it’s worth contemplating: Maybe this isn’t dysfunction. Maybe it’s actually the right play.
DFS was selling one story to one set of regulators, state by state, capitol by capitol. That required everybody citing chapter and verse from the same page. Prediction markets? They don’t even agree on what book they’re reading.
Kalshi is making its case to the CFTC. Polymarket is doing its thing on-chain. Robinhood is bolting event contracts onto a brokerage account. Trying to cram them (and all the others) under one talking-points umbrella might actually shrink their options instead of protecting them.
There’s a more fundamental structural problem, too. The companies in this space do not share the same stakes. Kalshi and Polymarket are dependent on prediction markets. It’s their whole bag. If they lose access to sports event contracts, it’s a problem. But for Coinbase, Robinhood, FanDuel, and most of the rest of the cohort? Prediction markets are just another vertical in an already successful core business. A loss would sting. It would not kill them.
“I don’t know how you ever merge the incentive structure,” Hammon said, “when the loss of sports prediction markets will be fatal to Kalshi and Polymarket, but ultimately survivable for everyone else.”
In that light, fragmentation starts to look less like dysfunction and more like risk management. If the CFTC brings down the hammer on Kalshi, the crypto-native model keeps humming along somewhere else. If Polymarket’s death markets continue to generate a tidal wave of bad press, Kalshi gets to point at itself and say, “That’s not us.” Instead of one big coalition taking one big bullet, you’ve got a bunch of smaller targets that are a lot harder to kill all at once. Whac-A-Mole, basically, except the moles have lawyers.
Chris Grove, Eilers & Krejcik Gaming partner emeritus and strategic advisor, sees a version of this that’s less cynical and more practical.
“A united front on the major issues is an advantage when your category is under fire, but some fragmentation is all but inevitable,” Grove told InGame. “And some level of fragmentation is likely healthy at this stage, where the best strategies, tactics, and arguments are still being discovered.”
He also cautions that some obvious differences are, perhaps obviously, more obvious than under-the-radar similarities.
“Alignment is also somewhat in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “Sometimes the differences between stakeholders are easier to spot and articulate than the commonalities. It’s not always readily apparent what the balance between the two actually is.”
Too late?
But Eccles, the man who lived through the DFS version of this, isn’t buying the fragmentation-as-strategy argument.
“I think we’re too late for that,” he said. “I think they’ve already decided their DNA and how they want to play. I don’t think there’s any moving back from it and it could be existential for them. They seem to argue a lot about what the law is, but what they seem to miss is that one of the reasons new laws get created is when people see an industry acting extremely badly. They’re making a lot of enemies. And I say this as a huge fan of prediction markets.”
Hammon offered a more sympathetic, if equally pessimistic, explanation. He pointed out that Polymarket’s CEO Shayne Coplan and Kalshi’s Tarek Mansour were told for years — by lawyers, consultants, state gambling regulators, federal regulators, everyone — that their core business models were wrong, that they would fail, that there were too many regulatory hurdles.
“To bang your head against that wall for three years and then finally succeed, when you were on the verge of having to abandon the project, and now being worth potentially $20 billion?” Hammon said. “No one can tell these guys anything. Period.”
He meant it as both a compliment and constructive criticism.
“What caused them to succeed is consistently not listening to the people around them who were telling them no,” he said. “So trying to get them to coalesce around one single idea now? It’s going to be impossible.”
Brogan acknowledged the tactical appeal of going it alone.
“If you think you can spin up your own government relations operation, maybe you can gain some advantage over your competitor that way,” he said. But he called that approach ultimately foolish. “The far greater war of this industry is establishing its legality as a federally regulated product in the United States. The industry should really speak as a unified voice for that.”
Brogan expects the current fragmentation to be temporary.
“There really is not a path for unregulated prediction markets to offer prediction markets to the United States,” he said.
In other words, whatever Polymarket’s crypto-native talking points might suggest, Brogan expects its U.S. operation will eventually have to look a lot more like Kalshi’s — CFTC-regulated, playing by the same rules. If that’s true, then the “different regulatory homes” argument starts to collapse, and the case for a unified front gets a lot stronger.
Cue the court
Then again, there is a case to be made that none of the infighting, the PR wars, or the coalition-building are mostly irrelevant.
Hammon believes there’s a 95% or better chance this whole issue gets decided by the Supreme Court.
“These public statements, these arguments made on Twitter and on CNBC and on podcasts, are not going to matter,” he said.
But he’s not entirely sure the mess is consequence-free. Even if the industry wins at the Supreme Court level, Hammon argued, the disorganized, decentralized, “shock-and-awe PR campaign” is increasing the risk of congressional action. And the courts, he noted, aren’t as insulated from the cultural noise as we might like to think. He pointed to recent federal court cases in Nevada and Ohio where judges referenced problem gambling and underage gambling in decisions where those issues had nothing to do with the legal question in front of them.
“I think it is unavoidable as human beings not to look at this and go, ‘Hey, we need to think about the most susceptible, vulnerable people who are going to be affected by this,'” Hammon said. “And judges clearly are having trouble at the federal level of separating those two things.”
So maybe the real question isn’t whether Coplan and Mansour can stand to be in the same room. Maybe it’s whether Congress and the CFTC — or more likely, the Supreme Court — can actually draw that bright line, one clear enough for the serious players to build on, no matter what is happening out on the fringe.
If the rules get written, if the courts agree, if Congress stands on the sidelines … well, today’s beefs are just noise nobody will remember.
If the rules are prohibitive and the courts step in and Congress gets involved? All the unity in the world probably won’t save them anyway.
