Flutter Entertainment is moving all sports and “novelty” contracts on FanDuel Predicts to Crypto.com, a significant reshaping of its prediction market offering announced Wednesday morning alongside the company’s second-quarter earnings.
CME Group, which remains the 51% owner of the FanDuel Predicts joint venture, will continue supplying financial contracts to the iGaming company’s prediction market platform, while Crypto.com becomes the primary exchange behind its sports and other non-financial event contracts. Flutter said the switch will provide a larger catalog for customers and a modest economic benefit.
At the same time, Flutter’s separate market making operation is ramping much faster than it was when the company first disclosed the initiative earlier this year. It generated $6 million in Q2 revenue, and Flutter now expects about $50 million in both revenue and adjusted EBITDA benefit from market making in 2026. Executives said Flutter intends to provide liquidity across multiple prediction market platforms but declined to identify where it is currently active.
Flutter acknowledged that FanDuel Predicts’ first-half progress was slower than planned and that Q2 revenue from the product was not material. Separately, the company announced Wednesday that CEO Peter Jackson will step down at the end of September, with Dan Taylor succeeding him Oct. 1.
CME remains majority owner as Crypto.com takes over FanDuel Predicts sports contracts
FanDuel Predicts launched in December 2025 with CME Group supplying its event contracts, including sports markets covering football, basketball, baseball and hockey. Crypto.com was added in June as a second exchange source, expanding the platform with additional sports and entertainment markets, plus parlay-style combination contracts.
Less than two months later, the arrangement is changing again, with Crypto.com now supplying all of FanDuel Predicts’ sports and “novelty” contracts.
The shift comes shortly after CME Chairman and CEO Terry Duffy publicly distanced the exchange from some of the more sportsbook-like products appearing on prediction market platforms. During CME’s July 22 earnings call, Duffy said “a lot of these prediction markets on sports are gambling” and specifically criticized small parlay-style contracts. He said CME did not want to participate in those types of products for now.
CME has not abandoned sports event contracts altogether and continues to list them, making Duffy’s distinction important. His criticism was directed particularly at products resembling sportsbook offerings, while Flutter is emphasizing a broader sports catalog and combo markets as it tries to make FanDuel Predicts more competitive.
Jackson said Wednesday that moving the contracts to Crypto.com brings a financial upside, although he portrayed the expanded product selection as the more important benefit.
“I think there’s probably a slight positive for us in moving towards Crypto.com,” he said. “This is a modest economic benefit, but the really important thing here is the step change we’re going to see in the catalog available for customers.”
Market making emerges as a second prediction market business
Flutter’s market making operation has quickly developed into a separate prediction market opportunity from FanDuel Predicts itself. The company only disclosed in May that it had begun testing the service on an unnamed major third-party platform. Three months later, executives are describing it as a high-margin business with ambitions to become a leading liquidity provider across the sector.
CFO Rob Coldrake said Flutter is seeing increasing activity across the prediction market ecosystem and believes its sportsbook pricing infrastructure gives it an advantage as products become more complex.
“Our ambition here … is to establish a leading position in this space by leveraging the pricing and risk-management and trading capabilities that we’ve developed over the years with our sportsbook,” Coldrake said. “And we feel that we’ve got a real advantage in pricing complex and correlated markets. As combo volume increases, we’re better placed to take advantage of that. And we see that as already an attractive and high-margin segment for us.”
The opportunity appears particularly focused on combination markets, where multiple correlated outcomes have to be priced together. Flutter said in its earnings release that it believes it is “uniquely positioned to provide liquidity for combination markets across prediction market platforms,” with the operation able to scale at relatively low incremental cost.
Volumes increasing
Despite forecasting roughly $50 million in market making revenue this year, Flutter gave little additional detail about where that business is coming from. Asked during the Q2 call which platforms Flutter expects to be most active on and how its trading breaks down between single-leg and combo markets, Coldrake did not identify any platforms or provide a mix.
He did, however, indicate that Flutter sees the business extending well beyond 2026.
“We’re definitely seeing volumes continue to increase across the ecosystem, and that gives us an increasing level of confidence in the long-term potential of that market,” Coldrake said.
FanDuel Predicts traction remains difficult to measure
Flutter was less forthcoming about the performance of FanDuel Predicts itself. The company acknowledged that operational progress during the first half was slower than anticipated. The earnings release said Q2 revenue from the platform was not material and it expects gross revenue in the second half to be offset by customer acquisition costs.
The executives declined to provide trading volume or user figures when Susquehanna analyst Joe Stauff asked for both. Coldrake characterized growth as substantial but coming from a limited starting point.
“The volumes are significantly up on quite a small base, so we’re making really good progress,” Coldrake said. “The Predicts numbers are consolidated within our reported financial results, but we’re not separately disclosing the volumes at this point.”
Flutter still sees prediction markets as incremental
Flutter continues to argue that prediction markets are adding to, rather than replacing, its regulated sportsbook business. Jackson said the impact on FanDuel in legal sports-betting states remains in the “very low-single-digit” range and described prediction markets as an expansion of Flutter’s total addressable market, or TAM.
“I look at this as incremental TAM,” Jackson said. “These are opportunities for us to go and acquire customers in advance of sportsbook regulation passing in, frankly, half of America where we can’t currently operate. And then there’s the opportunity for us to leverage our pricing and risk-management capabilities through market making on a national basis. Both of those things are incremental TAM for us.”
That view is also changing how Flutter reports its spending on FanDuel Predicts. Asked for an update on the previously disclosed 2026 investment range of $200 million to $300 million, Coldrake said Flutter has changed how it reports Predicts spending.
“With regard to the investment on Predicts, what we’ve done as a business in the last couple of quarters is really integrate Predicts with the sportsbook proposition,” Coldrake said. “So we’re no longer breaking out the investments separately.”
Despite that investment, Flutter does not expect prediction markets to overtake sportsbooks where both are available. Coldrake pointed to markets such as the U.K., Italy and Brazil, where betting exchanges coexist with traditional sportsbooks but hold relatively small market share.
“I don’t see that structure being any significantly different here in America,” Coldrake said. “So I think to the extent to which you have Predicts coexisting with regulated OSB, I would expect to see regulated OSB continue to take the vast majority of the business.”
Flutter cautious on owning an exchange
Flutter is taking a different approach to exchange ownership than some of its sportsbook rivals. DraftKings acquired CFTC-regulated Railbird Exchange to launch its own exchange, DKeX, while Fanatics agreed in July to acquire Water Street Labs and CX Clearinghouse, giving it a path to owning both an exchange and clearinghouse once the deal closes.
Asked whether Flutter might eventually pursue its own exchange rather than continuing to rely solely on third-party exchanges for its contracts, Jackson pointed to new regulatory complications around companies combining exchange ownership with market making. The CFTC on July 30 proposed new conflict-of-interest rules that would restrict trading by firms affiliated with an exchange and allow affiliated market makers only under specific conditions, including giving unaffiliated orders priority and requiring independent third-party oversight. The proposal specifically noted that affiliated market makers have become particularly prominent in prediction markets.
“This is a very fast-moving space, and there’s been news in the last few days around some of the complexities of market making if you own some of the exchange components,” Jackson said. “So we’ve just got to be thoughtful about positioning ourselves as well as we can. And I think we’re happy with the strategy that we have.”
Prediction market push comes amid weaker overall results
Flutter’s prediction market expansion comes against a difficult backdrop for its broader U.S. business. U.S. revenue fell 6% in Q2, including a 15% decline in sportsbook revenue, while U.S. adjusted EBITDA dropped 70% to $119 million. Across Flutter’s entire business, the company reported a $296 million net loss, compared with a $37 million profit a year earlier.
The company also cut its full-year U.S. outlook, lowering the midpoint of its revenue guidance from $7.795 billion to $7.4 billion and adjusted EBITDA guidance from $970 million to $760 million.
Even against that weaker backdrop, Flutter is continuing to build out its prediction market strategy, with FanDuel Predicts still in investment mode while market making is already emerging as a meaningful new revenue stream.
