Sports Betting Goes Mainstream & Has Expanded into ‘Bet on Anything’
For many Americans, the best part of Super Bowl Sunday isn’t the game. It’s the commercials. And this year, for the first time, you can make or lose real money trading on which brands will air spots during Super Bowl LX. Prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket are offering contracts on everything from whether Spotify will buy airtime to whether Sydney Sweeney will appear in an ad.
It’s a clever product. It’s also an insider trading nightmare waiting to happen, and the agency responsible for policing it just had its enforcement teeth pulled out.
How Super Bowl Ad Trading Works
The mechanics are simple. On Kalshi, a federally regulated exchange overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), users buy contracts priced between $0.01 and $0.99 based on the probability of an event occurring. If you buy a “Yes” contract on Pepsi advertising during the Super Bowl at $0.99, you’re paying 99 cents to potentially win $1.00. Not exactly a windfall. But pick up a “Yes” on Spotify at $0.37? That’s a potential 170% return if the streaming service decides to counter Apple Music’s halftime show sponsorship with its own spot.
Polymarket operates similarly, though its contracts resolve slightly differently, explicitly including sponsorship segments and branded integrations beyond traditional 30-second spots. Combined trading volume across both platforms for Super Bowl ad markets has already exceeded $25 million, according to industry trackers. The overall Super Bowl contract on “Who will win?” has generated more than $150 million in volume alone.
State Farm, Amazon, and Google are considered locks, all trading above 98 cents. Hims & Hers and Liquid Death are trending. Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, sits at a coin flip around 51.5%. And if you’re curious, a 30-second Super Bowl spot this year costs up to $8 million, with NBC reporting that between five and ten ads sold for more than $10 million each.
The Insider Trading Problem No One Can Ignore
Here’s the thing about predicting whether the Seahawks will beat the Patriots: nobody knows the outcome in advance. The game hasn’t been played. But Super Bowl ad buys? Hundreds, possibly thousands of employees at any given company know whether their employer is planning to drop $8 million on a commercial. So do their ad agencies, their media buyers, their production teams, and anyone involved in the months-long process of developing a Super Bowl campaign.
That makes these contracts fundamentally different from sports predictions, and far more susceptible to insider trading.
Consider the Spotify contract, which saw a suspicious spike on January 19, jumping from $0.35 to $0.69 before settling back down. Did someone at Spotify’s agency get loose lips at a cocktail party? Did an NBC ad sales rep mention the deal to a friend? There’s no way to know, and that’s precisely the problem.
Since Kalshi operates as a CFTC-regulated exchange, trading on material non-public information is technically a federal crime, the same way insider trading on stocks is illegal under SEC oversight. But “technically illegal” and “actually enforced” are two very different things in 2026.
A Regulator With No Teeth
The CFTC, the small federal agency tasked with overseeing prediction markets, has roughly one-eighth the staff of the SEC. Meanwhile, Kalshi alone processes more than $2 billion in trades per week, a figure the company says represents 1,000% growth compared to the Biden era. The math doesn’t add up for meaningful enforcement.
Making matters more complicated, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig announced on January 29 that the agency would withdraw a proposed rule from 2024 that would have banned prediction trades on sports and politics. Instead, he promised new rules supporting “the responsible development of event contract markets.” Translation: the industry is getting a longer leash, not a shorter one.
The Trump administration’s posture toward prediction markets has been unmistakably permissive. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., holds advisory roles at both Kalshi and Polymarket, the two largest prediction market platforms by volume. His venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, made an eight-figure investment in Polymarket. Truth Social, the president’s social media platform, is planning to launch its own prediction market called Truth Predict. Industry experts told CBS News they’re skeptical the recently gutted CFTC has the will or the means to police insider trading problems, especially given the family connections.
The Maduro Trade That Changed Everything
If you want a preview of how badly this can go, look no further than what happened on January 3. Hours before President Trump announced “Operation Absolute Resolve,” the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, an anonymous Polymarket user operating under the pseudonym “Burdensome-Mix” dropped $32,000 on a contract betting Maduro would be removed from power by month’s end. At the time, the contract was trading at roughly 8 cents. When Maduro was captured, the contract settled at $1.00. The payout: more than $400,000.
The account had been created just a week earlier and had almost no other trading activity. Online sleuths traced the funds to U.S. cryptocurrency exchanges, suggesting the trader wasn’t attempting to hide their identity. But nobody has been able to identify them publicly.
The trade prompted Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) to introduce the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026, which would prohibit federal employees from trading on politically related event contracts. “The intersection of insider trading and government decision making is not only corrupting to the market, it’s corrupting the government itself,” Torres told Fortune. The bill has not received bipartisan support.
The NFL Sees the Problem, Even If Regulators Don’t
In a telling move, the NFL has banned prediction market companies from advertising during the Super Bowl, lumping them in with prohibited categories alongside tobacco, pornography, and firearms. The league’s executive VP of public affairs, Jeff Miller, testified before a House committee in December, warning that the “substantially greater risks to contest integrity” posed by prediction markets were unacceptable.
DraftKings and FanDuel will run sportsbook ads during the game, but their prediction market products cannot be mentioned. The irony is rich: you can trade on whether a company will advertise during the Super Bowl, but the companies facilitating those trades can’t advertise there themselves.
States are pushing back too. Massachusetts and Nevada have filed lawsuits against prediction market companies. Nine other states, including New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, have sent cease-and-desist letters to Kalshi, arguing these platforms are operating as illegal, unlicensed sports gambling operations. Days before the Super Bowl, New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a pointed warning to consumers: “Be careful about placing trades on prediction markets.”
The Bigger Picture
Prediction markets are not inherently problematic. At their best, they aggregate information more efficiently than polls or pundit speculation, and there’s genuine academic evidence they can produce useful probability signals. But the Super Bowl ad contracts expose the fundamental tension at the heart of the industry: prediction markets work best when outcomes are genuinely uncertain. When thousands of insiders already know the answer, you don’t have an information market. You have a transfer of money from uninformed traders to informed ones.
Kalshi has responded to the scrutiny by expanding its surveillance operations, forming an independent surveillance advisory committee, and partnering with Solidus Labs and the Wharton Forensic Analytics Lab to monitor suspicious trading. The company’s CEO, Tarek Mansour, has maintained that insider trading has always been banned on the platform. Whether those safeguards are sufficient when the regulatory cop on the beat has been defunded and politically compromised is another question entirely.
A record $1.76 billion is expected to be wagered through traditional sportsbooks on Super Bowl LX this Sunday. Prediction markets will add an unknown but growing figure on top of that. For the advertising industry, which has spent decades treating the Super Bowl as a carefully controlled spectacle of brand messaging and cultural moments, the idea that anonymous traders are profiting off leaked media buys is a new and unwelcome complication. For everyone else, it’s a reminder that in 2026, if there’s money to be made on information asymmetry, someone will find a way to make it, whether the regulators are watching or not.