Fantasy to Forecasting: Underdog Acquires CFTC Licenses
Fantasy sports giant Underdog Sports has secured 50-state access through a deal with Aristotle Inc. Aristotle operates PredictIt, an academic prediction market platform focused on election markets.
Underdog acquired the exchange and clearinghouse licenses, allowing the company to offer prediction markets that the CFTC allows. Those have included all manner of sports contracts under Caroline Pham’s and Michael Selig’s tenures heading the CFTC.
Some prediction market deal news:
Fantasy sports company Underdog has acquired Aristotle’s CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse licenses.
Aristotle will continue to operate PredictIt, one of the OG political betting markets.
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— Lydia Beyoud (@ElleBeyoud) March 9, 2026
Jeremy Levine, CEO and Co-Founder of Underdog, said in a press release:
“We’re in the early innings of what prediction markets can be, especially for sports fans. We’ll use this opportunity to bring the same relentless focus on innovation and experience that we’ve always brought to our customers. The reality is, prediction markets are primarily about sports and no company knows how to engage with sports fans and create products for sports fans better than Underdog.”
Underdog plans to offer markets on “cultural events” besides sports, which could include political contracts. Politics is often treated as a sport and offers a new opportunity for Underdog to grow beyond its fantasy sports origins.
Underdog’s license acquisitions weren’t the only acquisition news in the prediction market industry on Monday.
Copy trading meets analytics
Copy trading bot PolyGun announced its acquisition of Polymarket Analytics on Monday. Polymarket Analytics tracks trader performances across both Kalshi and Polymarket, giving copy traders a larger data set to draw from to make their trades.
“PolyGun was built on a single belief: that every trader deserves to win. We have obsessed over giving our users the tools they need to make smarter, faster, and more profitable decisions. Acquiring Polymarket Analytics is the next evolution of that mission,” said Larry the Whale, CMO & CFO at PolyGun.
This latest acquisition is a peek ahead at what consolidation could look like, from exchanges down through trading tools. Startups from 2024 and 2025 have begun to pull far enough ahead to acquire competitors or strategic partners.
Industry moving to consolidation and defense
The prediction market industry grew exponentially on and off exchanges in 2025 in the wake of the 2024 presidential election. A permissive CFTC and mainstream awareness gave prediction market platforms a chance to reach new retail customers with new markets.
But 2026 has also seen the opposition to prediction markets become more organized. State gaming regulators have begun to mimic Massachusetts’ legal strategy that trapped Kalshi in state court instead of a more favorable federal venue.
The industry has grown from a series of academic experiments to a large one defending its gains from the past year.