The New Prediction Market Betting It Can Win Where Others Have Stumbled

Twenty-eight-year-old Jacob Fortinsky has no shortage of plates spinning right now. “This past weekend alone, I was a groomsman at two weddings,” he told me during a recent Zoom interview. On top of personal commitments, the sports trading startup he founded, Novig, just launched its prediction market last week—racking up $18 million in trading volume on its very first day of operation.

This week, Novig is rolling out a formal “responsible trading framework” to its exchange rulebook, codifying user protection guardrails as part of a push to position itself as a more thoughtful, consumer-focused alternative to existing prediction market operators. Unlike top industry incumbents Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow anyone 18 and older to trade, Novig requires all users to be at least 21 years old to join.

Fortinsky says the age restriction was created in response to “valid concerns” raised by the NCAA and other professional groups, who have long flagged younger users’ higher vulnerability to risky financial behavior. As public anxiety builds over prediction markets’ potential harm to teenagers, he frames the rule as a proactive step to get ahead of coming industry scrutiny. “There’s a broader reckoning coming for young traders,” he says. “That group is particularly susceptible to irresponsible behavior and long-term financial ruin.”

Novig’s updated rulebook also bans all marketing targeted at minors, and prohibits other questionable advertising tactics—such as claims that trading carries zero risk, or ads that exploit potential users’ financial struggles to lure them to the platform. For example, when Novig runs ads on TikTok, it adjusts platform targeting settings to only reach users over the age of 21.

Fortinsky positions these strict restrictions as core to Novig’s goal of establishing itself as a “serious, legitimate financial product” as it enters the crowded space. “Some of our competitors have gained a reputation for being a lot more cavalier in certain areas,” he says, declining to name specific rivals.

Because Novig only offers sports-themed prediction markets, it has stayed out of the polarizing political territory that has drawn controversy for other platforms, such as prediction markets for U.S. election results or the outcome of the Iran conflict. That does not mean it has avoided controversy entirely.

As a sports-exclusive platform, the type of speculation Novig offers sits directly at the center of a raging ongoing regulatory battle in the United States. On one side are prediction market operators and federal regulators; on the other are state regulators, tribal governing authorities, and at times traditional sportsbook and casino operators. Dozens of messy, overlapping legal battles are unfolding across the country: States are suing Kalshi and other platforms for allegedly offering illegal gambling; Kalshi has countersued; and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal body that oversees the industry, has sued multiple states to argue it alone holds jurisdiction over prediction markets.

Novig also faces the same widespread cultural pushback that has hit other prediction market players. When the New York Mets announced a recent partnership with Novig, the Major League Baseball team was flooded with angry criticism on social media. One viral comment called the partnership simply “vile.”

If regulators ultimately ban the sports event contracts that prediction markets offer, major players like Kalshi and Polymarket would face massive losses, as most of their trading activity is tied to these offerings. But Novig’s position is even shakier—sports prediction is the only service it offers.

Fortinsky is betting everything on a legal victory, and the startup wasted no time jumping into the ongoing fray. Just three days after launching its prediction market, Novig filed lawsuits against New York, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Washington, all states that have taken an aggressive stance to curb prediction market operations. The company is asking courts to block these states from applying their gambling laws to Novig, which operates as a federally licensed regulated exchange.

Sports betting attorney Daniel Wallach told WIRED that these lawsuits are as much a “great marketing strategy” as a legal action, a way for the new startup to announce its arrival to the market. Whether the legal challenge will succeed is another question entirely: Recent court decisions have largely sided with state attorneys general. A New York judge already rejected Novig’s request for a temporary restraining order, on the grounds that it would contradict an earlier ruling in a separate case against Kalshi.

“It’s increasingly looking more positive for the states,” Wallach notes. That could still change, he adds: Wallach and other industry observers expect the dispute will end up before the U.S. Supreme Court before any final resolution is reached.

Until that outcome, Novig is pushing ahead full force. One of the platform’s biggest selling points to users is its unique take on sports speculation: it operates without a house taking a “vig,” the standard fee bookmakers charge to arrange bets (the name Novig is a nod to this “no vig” model).

Fortinsky is sharply critical of dominant players in the traditional sports gambling industry, calling sportsbooks “inefficient, exploitative, and predatory.” He frames prediction markets’ peer-to-peer model as fundamentally different, because it matches two evenly matched parties against each other directly, with no middleman taking an cut.

But if Novig grows the way Fortinsky hopes, trades won’t always be between two casual sports fans. The company is actively courting large financial institutions to participate in its markets, and Fortinsky says Novig is currently onboarding proprietary trading firms and major banks. It is also building tools to make “programmatic trading” easier, letting users deploy algorithms to automatically place bets on everything from which team will win the Super Bowl to how many games the Mets will lose in a season.

“Something that's really cool to see is that you have hundreds of these small shops with a couple guys with $100,000 that are now competing against some of the largest Wall Street trading firms in the world and doing quite well,” he says.

It’s a good thing teens aren’t allowed to join the action.