SBC launches Global Prediction Markets Forum to debate regulatory status
SBC is launching a Global Prediction Markets Forum, a full-day event announced September 2. Industry leaders will debate whether prediction markets are financial products, betting products, or an undefined category. A panel including Crypto.com and Quirino Mancini of WH Partners Italy will specifically address whether event contracts constitute gambling. SBC frames the regulatory-status question as one of the most contested issues in global gambling.
The forum surfaces the exact definitional fight now costing Kalshi millions in court. The Ninth Circuit just ruled its sports contracts are bets, not swaps, and Nevada is enforcing that label. Every platform with CFTC registration faces the same preemption collapse if other federal circuits agree. Kalshi must geofence state by state while legal spend compounds and its national market fragments.
The SBC stage gives regulators, operators, and gambling commissioners a single venue to argue the boundary, but no speaker can change the fact that U.S. courts are drawing that line first. The platform that survives this classification war intact wins a permanently smaller but legally defensible territory.