Betr Tries Prediction Markets After Sportsbook Flopped
Betr bought a registered broker to skip the NFA queue and launch prediction markets, three years after its sportsbook stalled.
Betr, the sports-gaming company co-founded by Joey Levy and Jake Paul, has bought its way into the prediction-markets business. The company acquired Chicago-based ACM Futures, also known as Ascent Capital Markets, in a deal recorded in NFA filings dated May 14. ACM is a registered introducing broker with the National Futures Association and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which provides Betr with immediate authorization to offer event contracts on behalf of designated contract markets such as Kalshi or Polymarket.
The acquisition allows Betr to skip the standard NFA approval process, which the company had been waiting on since October. Seven months in, that application had shown no progress. Buying a pre-approved broker is a workaround. It’s the same one Fanatics used in August when it acquired Paragon Global Markets to launch Fanatics Markets without waiting in the NFA queue.
For Betr, the deeper story is what this pivot represents. The company launched in 2022 as a microbetting-focused sportsbook, raised significant venture capital on the promise of disrupting the major operators, and is now, three years later, an introducing broker for somebody else’s prediction market.
What Betr Will Actually Offer
The acquisition appears to be in service of Betr’s previously announced partnership with Polymarket. In a March press release, the company said it would “launch prediction markets powered by Polymarket directly within the Betr super app, making events contracts across sports, politics, culture, and more available to one million paying users.”
The structural arrangement is worth understanding. Introducing brokers can’t directly hold customer funds. They partner with designated contract markets, such as Polymarket US, and route trades to those exchanges. The end customer is technically trading on the partner’s exchange. Betr’s role is acquisition, retention, and user experience.
That’s a meaningfully different business model than running a sportsbook. The economics are entirely different. The regulatory exposure is also completely different. What Betr is doing is essentially licensing Polymarket’s product and putting it inside a wrapper that Betr’s existing users already have on their phones.
Betr’s Non-Traditional Products Outperform Its Sportsbook
Betr launched its sportsbook in Ohio in January 2023, with microbetting as the differentiator and Jake Paul as the marketing hook. Three years later, Betr Sportsbook is live in just three states: Ohio, Massachusetts, and Virginia. In Ohio, the company is one of the state’s smallest online sportsbooks, averaging roughly $670,000 in monthly handle, according to state regulatory data reported in late 2023.
By comparison, DraftKings and FanDuel each take in well over $300 million in monthly Ohio handle. Betr’s sportsbook isn’t competing with the leaders. It’s competing with the regional operators in the bottom quartile.
The daily fantasy product, Betr Picks, has done better than the sportsbook. It’s live in 33 states, including large markets like California and Texas, where real-money sports betting isn’t legal. The company that pitched itself in 2022 as the future of microbetting is now best known for its fantasy product in states where sports betting isn’t legal.
Prediction Markets Offer Nationwide Market Access
The strategic logic is straightforward enough. Daily fantasy is a low-margin, heavily regulated business with mature competitors in PrizePicks and Underdog. Sportsbook expansion requires state-by-state licensing, deep capital, and operational scale that Betr lacks. Prediction markets, by contrast, are federally regulated by the CFTC, can operate in all 50 states the moment the broker license is cleared, and can ride on the infrastructure Polymarket and Kalshi have already built.
DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish recently argued that prediction markets are still a niche product and that platforms entering the space are “2-3 years of development away” from delivering a competitive sports betting experience. The numbers support him on the user experience point. The numbers also support the case that being early on a federally preempted product, with national distribution, beats being late on a state-by-state sportsbook that hasn’t scaled.
For Betr specifically, prediction markets solve a problem the sportsbook never could. The company can offer event contracts to its million-plus existing daily fantasy users in all 33 of its current DFS states, plus the other 17 it hasn’t yet entered. That’s really the entire pitch for Betr.
Betting Operators Buy Their Way Into the Predictions Space
Betr is the second sports-adjacent company to buy an existing introducing broker rather than wait for the NFA. As mentioned, Fanatics did it in August with Paragon. DraftKings and PrizePicks both went through the standard application route, with DraftKings taking six months and PrizePicks taking four. The NFA’s own website notes applications “may take six weeks or longer.” The reality is significantly longer than that, and for sports betting companies trying to enter a market that is moving in real time, the wait has become commercially unviable.
What’s now emerging from the wait time is a two-track structure. Companies with strong existing brands and capital can immediately buy their way into prediction markets. Companies without those resources have to wait for the better part of a year. The window for new entrants to actually launch a competitive product is closing fast.
For Betr, this is the third pivot in three years. They started with a microbetting sportsbook concept. Daily fantasy, following microbetting, has seen slightly more national success. Now they are chasing the newest trend with prediction markets. The company that launched as the future of sports gaming has spent its existence searching for a product that scales. Whether prediction markets are the answer is genuinely open. What’s clear is that the sportsbook bet didn’t pay off, and Betr is moving on.
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