Missouri’s crackdown on sports prediction contracts is now facing two federal court challenges, with operators linked to Crypto.com and Novig pushing back against state efforts to treat the products as unlicensed gambling.

TL;DR: Two companies filed lawsuits on October 16 after receiving Missouri cease-and-desist letters. Their central argument is that federally regulated event contracts fall under CFTC oversight, but the courts have not resolved that question.

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway gave six platforms notice in September that they should stop offering the relevant contracts to state residents or comply with sports-wagering rules. The state argues that a contract paying out based on a sporting result is a bet in substance, whatever name a platform gives it.

North American Derivatives Exchange, behind Crypto.com’s prediction offering, filed in Missouri’s Western District. Novig operator Ludlow Exchange filed separately in the Eastern District. Both are asking the courts to restrict state enforcement while the dispute over jurisdiction plays out.

The conflict cuts to the business model of prediction exchanges. A federally supervised derivatives venue may argue that it should not need to obtain a separate state gambling licence for every jurisdiction in which a customer trades. States respond that sports wagering rules, including age restrictions and local taxes, cannot be bypassed simply through contract design.

Kalshi, Polymarket, Robinhood and Underdog also received Missouri letters, but had not filed comparable cases there as of the latest court review. Their choices should not be mistaken for acceptance of the state’s position.

For now, the litigation is an opening move. Neither filing establishes that Missouri’s restrictions are unlawful, and any interim court order would be narrower than a final judgment on how sports event markets can operate nationwide.

Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

TL;DR: Coinbase Financial Markets has agreed to stop offering new sports-related event contracts to Michigan customers by October 10 and close remaining open positions by the same deadline. Michigan agreed not to pursue enforcement while Coinbase complies, but the wider legal fight over whether states can regulate federally registered event contracts remains unresolved.

Coinbase is pulling sports prediction contracts out of Michigan while its legal battle with the state continues.

The Michigan Gaming Control Board said Coinbase Financial Markets has agreed to stop offering new sports-related event contracts to residents by midnight Eastern Time on October 10.

Any remaining open customer positions must also be closed by that deadline.

The agreement does not settle the underlying argument.

Coinbase has maintained that event contracts offered through federally regulated designated contract markets fall under federal commodities oversight rather than state gambling law.

Michigan sees the products differently.

State regulators have argued that sports contracts amount to wagering and therefore cannot be offered to Michigan residents without complying with the state’s gaming rules.

Under the new stipulation, Michigan has agreed not to take enforcement action against Coinbase as long as the company complies with the restrictions while related court appeals continue.

That leaves the legal question intact.

Coinbase is not the only platform caught in the dispute.

Michigan has also reached an agreement with Robinhood and obtained a preliminary injunction involving Kalshi. Appeals connected to Robinhood, Polymarket and Kalshi are moving through the courts alongside the wider debate over prediction markets.

The conflict has grown quickly because event contracts have expanded far beyond elections and macroeconomic outcomes.

Sports markets put the industry directly against state gaming regulators that already supervise conventional sportsbooks.

From the platform perspective, the contracts are federally regulated derivatives.

From the state perspective, asking users to put money on whether a team wins looks a lot like sports betting regardless of the legal wrapper used to create the market.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and the gaming board have taken an aggressive position on that distinction.

Coinbase had sought a preliminary injunction against the state but was denied in August. Its appeal remains pending.

The temporary agreement now removes the immediate enforcement risk while the courts consider the larger jurisdictional question.

Non-sports products are not the focus of the deal.

That matters because Coinbase’s push into event markets is broader than sports and forms part of the company’s attempt to become a multi-asset trading platform rather than a crypto exchange alone.

The Michigan fight shows the cost of that expansion.

Prediction markets can sit simultaneously inside commodities law, gambling law and financial regulation depending on how a contract is structured and what it references.

Platforms are discovering that federal registration does not necessarily stop individual states from asserting their own authority.

For Michigan users, the practical outcome is much simpler than the legal argument.

Sports contracts are going away by October 10.

Whether they stay away permanently will be decided somewhere else.

TL;DR: Polymarket has begun testing Protocol V2, a major rebuild of the smart contracts behind its prediction markets. The architecture consolidates markets around a unified exchange system and pUSD collateral, with canary testing expected to continue through October 30 ahead of a tentative November 2 transition for new markets.

Polymarket is replacing much of the infrastructure underneath the product that made it one of crypto’s best-known prediction markets.

Protocol V2 has entered live testing, introducing a new smart-contract architecture designed to simplify how markets, positions, collateral and settlement interact.

The changes are deeper than a user-interface refresh.

Polymarket’s existing infrastructure grew over time around a collection of contracts and extensions.

V2 moves toward a more unified structure capable of supporting different market types through a common system.

One of the most visible changes is collateral.

The new architecture standardizes around pUSD, giving new markets a common collateral asset rather than relying on the older arrangement.

Positions are also being consolidated through a shared token framework, while routing and oracle components are being reorganized to make new market types easier to support.

Polymarket is not moving everything at once.

A limited set of canary markets is being used to test the V2 contracts in live conditions through October.

The current schedule calls for that testing phase to run until October 30, with November 2 targeted as the point at which new markets begin moving fully to the updated system.

Existing markets do not simply disappear.

Legacy positions can continue to settle under the infrastructure on which they were created.

That phased approach reduces the risk of forcing open markets through a contract migration while funds and positions remain active.

The overhaul arrives as prediction markets continue to expand beyond a niche crypto product.

Platforms such as Polymarket now attract substantial attention around elections, macroeconomic events, technology, sports and breaking news.

As volumes and market variety increase, infrastructure built for a smaller product can eventually become a constraint.

Protocol V2 appears designed to solve that before it becomes a larger problem.

The upgrade also gives Polymarket more flexibility in how it creates markets and resolves outcomes.

That could become important as the platform expands into more complicated events that cannot always be represented cleanly by a single yes-or-no contract.

For users, the immediate change may look modest.

Underneath the interface, however, Polymarket is replacing much of the system responsible for determining what a position is, what backs it and how it settles.

For a prediction market, there are few pieces of infrastructure more important than those.

TL;DR

• Bybit has launched Bybit Odds, a product for tracking prediction-market probabilities and sentiment.
• The launch campaign includes a 17,000 USDT reward pool.
• Bybit Odds is an analytics product integrated into the exchange, not a standalone decentralized prediction-market protocol.

Bybit is moving into prediction markets without launching a new betting chain or standalone venue.

The exchange has introduced Bybit Odds, an analytics product designed to surface probability and sentiment data from prediction markets inside its own trading ecosystem.

Prediction Data Becomes Another Trading Signal

Bybit says the product aggregates real-time odds and presents them through probability visualizations and sentiment tools.

That positions prediction-market data as another input for traders alongside price charts, funding rates and order-book signals.

The launch also includes a 17,000 USDT promotional reward pool for early users.

The interesting part is not the campaign itself.

It is the way prediction markets are increasingly being treated as a data source rather than a separate category of product.

Bybit Odds Is Not A New Decentralized Market

Users should keep the product’s role straight.

Bybit Odds does not create a new blockchain-based prediction market where users mint positions or settle events through a decentralized protocol.

It is an analytics layer integrated into Bybit.

That makes it closer to a market-intelligence feature than a standalone prediction exchange.

Still, the launch says something about where trading platforms think demand is going.

Probability markets are becoming mainstream enough that a major crypto exchange now considers their data worth packaging directly for active traders.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.