After months as one of the industry’s most talked-about trends, prediction markets have now entered a new phase with the launch of the first fixed-odds solution designed specifically for sportsbooks: BETBY Predictions. Developed under the leadership of Kirill Nekrasov, Head of Innovation and R&D at BETBY, the product aims to bring prediction markets into a format that aligns with how users place bets, making them more accessible and scalable for operators. In this article, Nekrasov explains why prediction markets have remained outside sportsbook platforms until now, breaking down the structural, regulatory, and content-related challenges that have prevented their integration.

The Missing Link: Why Prediction Markets Haven’t Scaled in Sportsbooks

Over the past year, prediction markets have become impossible to ignore for the iGaming industry.

Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi have brought the concept into the spotlight, leading people to interact with daily events in a very different way. They are forming opinions, tracking developments, and looking for ways to act on what they believe will happen next.

“When you look at how users behave today, they’re already thinking about probabilities,” says Kirill Nekrasov, BETBY’s Head of Innovation and R&D. “They’re asking themselves ‘will this happen or not?’ all the time, whether it’s entertainment, elections, or technology. And even though prediction platforms didn’t create that behaviour, they gave it a place to exist and instilled interest.”

When you look at the numbers, the momentum is undeniable. Trading volume was estimated to pass $27.9 billion in 2025, according to the contracts traded, with tens of thousands of markets created every month and long-term growth projected at several times the current size. Those figures speak for themselves, but what they represent matters even more: they reflect a shift in how people engage with content beyond sports.

In practical terms, this means that a user might be following a football match, then checking Bitcoin, then reading about a new AI release, all within the same session. From a product perspective, these are all part of a single flow of attention, and prediction markets fit perfectly within that flow.

Breaking down the model

Despite that momentum, sportsbooks have struggled to seize the opportunity and integrate prediction markets into their platforms. Why?

The main issue comes from how prediction markets are built. The leading platforms operate as exchanges, which introduces a completely different interaction model compared to sports betting. In this case, pricing is driven by user activity, and the experience only really works if there are enough people actively trading in each market, rather than letting users simply decide if something will happen.

From my perspective, this creates a disconnect with the average sportsbook user. Someone who is used to placing bets expects to see a market, understand the possible outcomes, and make a decision quickly. When that process becomes more abstract, engagement drops because the user is forced to pause and interpret how the system works.

“We’ve looked at a lot of these platforms in detail,” Nekrasov explains. “They work well for a specific audience that enjoys the trading aspect, but if you bring that same experience into a sportsbook, you immediately lose a large percentage of users. The interaction becomes something they need to figure out instead of something they can just do right away, and that’s a real challenge.”

Take this simple example. On a typical exchange platform, a user might see a market priced as a probability, something like a 62% chance of an event happening. To engage with that, they need to understand what that number represents, whether it reflects value, and how it might move over time.

In a sportsbook environment, the expectation is completely different. The same question needs to be presented in a way that is easy to understand, with clear outcomes and clear payouts. In the end, that difference in format defines whether a user engages or not.

Regulation as a barrier

There is also a regulatory dimension that becomes crucial once you try to scale prediction markets globally.

By March 2026, platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi had been restricted or even banned in at least 33 countries across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. For a sportsbook operator working across multiple jurisdictions, this ends up creating a compliance burden and affecting revenue streams, changing the nature of the product quite fundamentally.

“This is something people often underestimate,” says Nekrasov. “You can’t just replicate what exists in an open prediction platform and expect it to work globally. Operators demand consistency, they need control over content, and they need to be sure everything aligns with regulation in different markets. That changes how you approach the product from day one.”

In practical terms, this means that every market is a liability that needs to be clearly defined, monitored, and settled in a way that can withstand scrutiny.

It also means that speed and creativity are many times constrained because what might be acceptable in one jurisdiction may not be in another, and scaling a product across multiple markets requires a level of standardisation that open platforms are not designed to handle.

The content constraint

Closely tied to regulation is the question of what kind of markets can actually be offered.

Many of the most engaging prediction markets on open platforms are built around topics that are, by nature, sensitive or controversial. Politics, geopolitical developments, and real-world crises often drive strong engagement because they sit at the centre of public attention. This includes, for example, markets speculating on the Russia–Ukraine war, where users could trade on potential escalation scenarios, or during the COVID-19 pandemic, when some platforms faced backlash for hosting markets tied to infection rates and public health outcomes. 

For sportsbooks, this creates a very different set of considerations, attracting regulatory scrutiny and raising ethical concerns.

Operators need to ensure that content is appropriate, responsible, and aligned with both regulatory frameworks and brand positioning. Markets cannot be built around outcomes that involve harm, conflict, or ethically questionable situations, even if those topics are widely discussed elsewhere.

“Not every question that people are curious about should become a betting market,” Nekrasov says. “That’s the difference between an open prediction platform and a regulated sportsbook product. You need filters not just for compliance, but for responsibility as well.”

And once those filters are applied, the challenge goes beyond identifying what people are interested in. It quickly becomes a process of selecting what is appropriate, defining it clearly, and ensuring that the outcome can be measured and settled without ambiguity.

Even something that seems straightforward at first glance can become complex when you consider how different users might understand the same question. For example, a market like “will a tech company launch a new product this year?” requires a clear definition around what qualifies as a launch, what sources are considered valid, and how edge cases are handled. Without that clarity, you’re almost guaranteed to run into disputes.

From experience, this is one of the less visible challenges, but also one of the most important because content is what ultimately defines trust.

Bridging the gap

All of these factors influenced how we built BETBY Predictions, our recently launched fixed-odds prediction markets solution for sportsbooks.

The starting point was understanding that prediction markets could not simply be adapted from existing exchange models. They needed to be restructured in a way that aligns with sportsbook behaviour, operational requirements, and regulatory constraints from the outset.

That is why the product is built around fixed odds, removing the dependency on user-driven pricing and liquidity, and allowing users to interact with markets in a familiar way. At the same time, it is supported by a dedicated team and AI-driven market generation, enabling fast, scalable content creation while maintaining full control over how markets are managed.

Equally important is how content is managed from a compliance perspective. Markets are carefully curated to ensure they remain appropriate, responsible, and aligned with regulatory expectations across jurisdictions, avoiding the types of sensitive or controversial topics that often create challenges for open prediction platforms. This allows operators to scale the product with confidence, without compromising on compliance or brand integrity.

“When you put all these pieces together, that’s when prediction markets start to make sense in sportsbooks,” Nekrasov concludes. “It’s how everything works together — the format, the control, the content — that makes the product scalable and, of course, appealing to bettors.”

Looking ahead, the importance of this approach is only set to grow. Jurisdictions like Malta have already announced plans to licence prediction market operators, with a focus on enabling the sector to develop responsibly, while in the UK, the Gambling Commission has indicated that prediction markets are close enough to betting exchanges to require a similar regulatory framework. The direction is clear: compliance will need to be built into the product from day one.