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Thanks to the “rapid growth of crypto currencies” and globally recognisable branding through marketing and sponsorships, this handful of operators are generating the majority of illegal gambling traffic across Europe.
The report also cites brands targeting a specifically banned vertical or product within a jurisdiction as driving black market activity. While markets across Europe have many examples, one such flagged in the report is that iGaming remains illegal for licensed operators in France.
“The largest black market operators have scaled to create recognisable brands with traffic that can compare to domestically licensed operators,” the report’s authors wrote. “The top group of sites by common owner has a 12% share of traffic, while the largest single brand has 10%.”
About 888 Of Olympus
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) agrees, continuing to defend its claimed “exclusive jurisdiction” over sports prediction markets in federal and state courts across the nation.
The legal wrangling extends to Michigan, where Attorney General Dana Nessel has rejected Polymarket and the CFTC’s arguments that the Michigan Gaming Control Board has no regulatory authority over prediction markets, even the ones allowing traders to buy and sell shares of sports outcomes.
Since returning its prediction market to the US, Polymarket has regularly engaged in nonconforming advertising. Painting a water tower in the company’s blue and branding the structure with its logo is the firm’s latest marketing ploy.
About 888 Of Olympus
If the research firm’s $190 billion taker volume estimate proves accurate, it’d represent a more than eightfold increase from the $22 billion taker turnover seen last year.
Potentially boding well for the Macquarie forecast are at least two factors. First, there are signs of turnover increases across a variety of yes/no exchanges. Second, volume surged to start September with those spikes arriving even before the NFL season kicked off.
As Macquarie analyst Chad Beynon points out, prediction markets generated $4.3 billion in taker volume during the first week of September without any help from the NFL, building on momentum from the 2026 World Cup. However, the NFL’s impact was immediate, with taker volume hitting a daily record during Week 1 of the campaign.
