Novig Co-Founder Jacob Fortinsky Says Sports Betting Should Be Regulated as Federal Financial Product

At Consensus Miami 2026, Novig co-founder and CEO Jacob Fortinsky argued that sports betting should be regulated as a federal financial product rather than a state-licensed casino product.

“Sports betting should be regulated as a financial product, not gambling, aspiring prediction market provider says Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky said his company will transition to a federal Designated Contract Market framework this summer to launch in all 50 states, while 57 Maiden's Adam Mastrelli said he was banned from two major sportsbooks within two months for being “sharp”

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Fortinsky said the legacy sportsbook model is structurally broken because it treats winning bettors as cheaters, adding, "Sports betting is really the only industry in the country that regularly limits and bans their power users."

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57 Maiden founder Adam Mastrelli said he and his partner were banned from two big sportsbooks within two months of trading because they were "sharp," and he compared the situation to "LeBron James getting kicked out of the NBA for being too good."

Fortinsky said Novig is on track to transition this summer from a sweepstakes model live in 35 states to a federal Designated Contract Market framework that will let it operate in all 50 states.

He also said the federal-state fight over sports event contracts is "going to get to the Supreme Court in the next two or three years," with 15 pending lawsuits involving the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Kalshi, Robinhood and various states.

Mastrelli validated Fortinsky's critique with his own experience, saying his firm builds AI-driven trading strategies for prediction markets and that their edge decayed quickly.

He said that of 154 proposed trading strategies, only three currently run profitably, and he warned, "This edge will go away," while arguing that systems that can keep up with that edge and "alpha" could become "really, really intriguing."

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Mastrelli said his team turned to Novig, which he described as charging no fees and allowing traders to create synthetic positions.

Fortinsky argued that within prediction markets, sports is "counterintuitively actually the safest vertical," given the bigger insider-trading and manipulation concerns around political and event-driven contracts.

He compared prediction markets to equities exchanges, saying, "When I see a robust equities market now, this is AQR against SIG. It doesn't go away."

Carbone 4 said SFDR 2.0 proposes changes to simplify and clarify climate reporting on financial activities, including the stated aim of "simplify and reduce the administrative and information requirements related to sustainability."

The proposal would introduce three new categories for defining sustainable investment—ESG basics, Transition, and Sustainable—with a minimum alignment threshold of 70% with one of the three categories mentioned above.

Carbone 4 said PAI reporting at the entity level is no longer mandatory and that "The removal of the obligation to perform a Do No Significant Harm (DNSH) assessment" is among the changes.

Carbone 4 also said the amendment proposals could allow a 25% reduction in compliance costs, meaning savings of EUR 163 million, especially for European SMEs, according to Les Echos.

It warned that removing entity-level reporting could create governance inconsistencies in sustainability strategy if product objectives differ from those of the entity, while also noting that SFDR 2.0 would require updates to MiFID II questionnaires and alignment with the European Green Taxonomy categories.