DonCorleone77
$GENI Genius Sports CEO says Americans are going to keep wagering on sports
Genius Sports issued a note from Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, which read in part, "The future of sports prediction markets is being discussed as though it hangs on a single legal answer: either today's model survives or the opportunity disappears. After 25 years across sports, betting and technology, my conclusion is different. Prediction markets will remain a meaningful part of US sports trading, but I do not expect today's structure to survive unchanged. Some current advantages will disappear, and today's winners may not be tomorrows. Prediction markets did not invent the desire to wager on a sporting outcome. They offer another way to express it, and what is durable is the demand underneath.
Customers want to take positions on sporting outcomes; capital wants to provide liquidity around them; and distributors want those customers. Regulation can change the route the activity takes without removing the activity...Prediction markets have brought new liquidity into sports wagering: new customers, most of them in states that had no legal online product, and new capital committed to pricing their trades, from institutional market makers to the sportsbooks now running market-making desks of their own. That liquidity is here to stay. The prediction markets of today are very unlikely to look like the prediction markets of tomorrow: the rules on access, tax and product will move, and some of today's advantages will move with them. What is almost certain is that the liquidity will be captured, taxed and regulated under some regime, federal, state or both.
That journey has started: North Carolina already taxes exchanges' net trading-fee revenue, Illinois has added a transaction levy, and the CFTC is writing its framework. [3, 9] It will take years. We are confident that Genius is well positioned to be paid at every point along it. Today we supply the exchanges, the market makers behind them and the sportsbooks competing with them for the same customer. At the endpoint we will supply whoever the rules leave in charge of the activity, and at every stage in between we will supply both sides. The route decides who pays us. The demand decides that we are paid. Americans are going to keep wagering on sports, and Genius will be paid however they do it."
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