Fanatics Buys Regulated Exchange to Build Its Own Prediction Markets Business

Fanatics no longer needs anyone’s permission to launch a new prediction market. The sports merchandise and betting company has bought its way into owning a federally regulated exchange and clearinghouse outright, cutting out the third party it previously depended on to list and settle its own event contracts.

The acquired exchange carries designation as a regulated contract market, and the clearinghouse is a registered derivatives clearing organization, both under U.S. commodities law. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. What changes in practice is speed and control: Fanatics can now decide on its own which contracts to list and how fast to bring them to market, rather than waiting on a partner’s roadmap.

The seller and Fanatics also plan to jointly build data products that blend prediction market activity with traditional financial market data — a hint that both companies see retail betting behavior as a signal worth packaging and selling alongside conventional market data feeds.

Prediction markets, where users trade contracts tied to real-world outcomes, have gone from a crypto-native curiosity to a category with its own licensed infrastructure and mainstream consumer platforms in the span of a couple of years. Fanatics already runs a prediction markets product across roughly two dozen U.S. states and territories, built on top of a sports fan base most exchanges would kill for. Owning the exchange outright, rather than renting access to one, is the clearest signal yet that the company intends to treat this as core infrastructure rather than a side experiment.

It is also part of a broader pattern: large consumer brands with existing audiences, not just crypto-native startups, are increasingly buying rather than licensing the regulated plumbing behind event contracts. Other companies with betting-adjacent user bases have made similar moves in the past year, and U.S. regulators have so far let the category expand under existing commodities rules rather than writing new ones specifically for it.

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