Kalshi and Polymarket will soon have to make room for a new player in the prediction marketspace.
Matchbook, a sports betting exchange, will debut its prediction market in January 2026, according to Bloomberg. Ronan McDonagh, the company’s interim chief executive officer, said that Matchbook plans to “road test” its technology in the United Kingdom before expanding to the US in March.
As a “betting exchange,” Matchbook functions by matching buyers and sellers. Typically, sportsbooks take the opposite side of the customer’s bet; betting exchanges set two customers betting against each other. The house (in this case, the platform) takes a small fee for the exchange, and the vig (i.e., the vigorish, or the cut) is usually smaller for each bet.
Because Matchbook is a betting exchange, it is already set to dive into the prediction markets space. Instead of displaying the contracts in fractional odds (e.g., 2:1), it will shift to a percentage of probability for a “yes” or “no” outcome.
“It’s not new in the sense that it works on the same engine as an exchange,” McDonagh told Bloomberg. “It should be more understandable, so I think we’re hopeful that it captures a new audience or it intrigues people to have a look.”
Matchbook (Triplebet Ltd., registered in the British dependency of Guernsey) has been operating as a sports exchange for 20 years. It’s currently majority-owned by Zeljko Ranogajec, a mysterious professional gambler originally from Australia.
Ranogajec was in the news recently. In April, the Wall Street Journal named him as one of the key players in a 2023 operation that netted a 57 million dollar Texas Lottery jackpot. Ranogajec has a reputation as a “Joker” in the betting world for his ability to “pull off this kind of stunt in far-flung casinos and at racetracks around the world,” according to the WSJ.
Matchbook’s U.S. partner, RSBIX LLC, filed the paperwork with the CFTC back in September. RSBIX is currently led by Jeff Ifrah, one of President Donald Trump’s former defense attorneys.
Kalshi and Polymarket have not been cleared to operate in the U.K., so the launch of Matchbook’s new platform will gauge the temperature and see whether American enthusiasm for prediction markets has hit Britain.
McDonagh said that the company is willing to partner with a recognized brand when it launches in the States. “We’re not sentimental about going in as Matchbook,” he told Bloomberg. “We’ve been in the exchange business so long, and we’ve got a really strong tech platform. We’ve got strong market-making partners, liquidity and a great product. We’ll be able to compete on day one in the US.”
