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Rewind to the 2022 Super Bowl; almost every crypto business had an ad strategy for one of the world’s biggest sporting events.

Coinbase aired an iconic bouncing QR code ad, a campaign that drove so much traffic it temporarily crashed the site. It was reported that the ad redirected 60 million people to their platform. That’s pretty good cost-per-click and marketers worldwide pointed to it as an incredibly simple but effective campaign.

Meanwhile, then-competitors FTX recruited comedian Larry David for an ad that went viral. When FTX went bankrupt, the ad went viral again for all the wrong reasons. The bright side I suppose, is the evangelical nature of the ad is looked upon kindly with hindsight if you take the brand that made it out of the picture…

The year after, in 2023, Reddit teamed up with the NFL to launch NFT Collectible Avatars.

1.3 million people minted the NFL Reddit Avatars, and it was seen as a great success for both the platform and the NFL.

Famously in that same year, the company behind NFT project ‘DigiDaigaku’, spent $7m on an ad that used a QR code to redirect viewers to the founders’ Twitter account. A strange way to spend your entire year’s marketing budget.

In 2024 we didn’t see any crypto ads, and that trend followed in this year’s Super Bowl in 2025.

The crypto headlines, however, were made by Polymarket - who saw a huge amount of volume come to their site for Super Bowl LIX.

Polymarket is a blockchain-enabled prediction market platform where users can trade on the outcomes of events using cryptocurrency (USDC), operating on the Polygon Layer 2 Ethereum network.

The platform experienced explosive growth in 2024, recording $9 billion in volume from 314,000 active traders. The platform operates on a model where users essentially "buy" and "sell" shares representing their confidence in specific outcomes. The U.S. presidential election in late 2024 put Polymarket on the map in the mainstream, with over $3.7bn in volume predicting the outcome, but their total lifetime sports-related contract volume has now surpassed $6bn, making it now their biggest market.

The platform has once again made headlines, this time in sports. Super Bowl LIX saw $1.1 billion in trading volume as users predicted the winners of the biggest prize in American sports. To put this into perspective, this represents nearly 80% of the American Gaming Association's projected $1.39 billion in total legal Super Bowl wagers.

Predictions markets have made headlines in a big way, globally, in the past 3 months.

As we covered very recently, cryptoasset exchange and big sports sponsor crypto[dot]com made waves when they announced sports event markets. This prompted the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to probe the cryptoasset exchange.

Similarly, Polymarket have also been subject to a CFTC investigation, as part of a broader investigation into prediction markets and in January 2025, Coinbase was subpoenaed by the CFTC as part of their investigation.

This is against the backdrop where trading platform Kalshi is already fighting the CFTC about its definition of these events contracts — who ended up filing against the regulator.

Kalshi filed to launch political predictions markets in June 2023, which was rejected by the CFTC in September 2023 — citing concerns over legality, as the contracts ‘resembled gambling and could be considered contrary to the public interest under federal and state laws’. In September 2024, courts allowed Kalshi to proceed with these contracts — with the rationale based on disagreeing with the CFTC’s equation of ‘gaming’ with ‘gambling’.

And to add a final spanner to the works — weeks before the Super Bowl, Robinhood announced that they would be launching the ability to trade these event contracts through a partnership with Kalshi. This was months after Robinhood leadership had made it clear that they were interested in the gambling market. Robinhood however removed the ability to trade these contracts after formal request from the CFTC — saying they are “disappointed by the outcome, especially given that we have been in regular communication with the CFTC”.

This feels complicated, and messy and crosses several industries; Crypto, gambling, trading and tech more generally.

To summarise:

The prediction market industry is approaching a regulatory inflexion point.

Polymarket's Super Bowl performance in terms of volume, alongside the heavy-handed approach against Kalshi and Robinhood, demonstrates both the market's potential and the urgent need for regulatory clarity whilst in parallel showing the hunger from consumers for this type of offering.

The CFTC's speed, combined with some of the precedent set following the Kalshi court decision, suggests we're moving toward a more nuanced understanding of prediction markets that could create opportunities for further innovation while maintaining appropriate oversight.

With established crypto exchanges, traditional trading platforms, and potentially sports betting operators all converging in this space, 2025 could mark the year when prediction markets transition from a crypto niche to a mainstream regulated financial product category. The question remains whether this expansion will trigger stricter regulatory scrutiny or lead to a more accommodating framework that recognises the unique nature of these products.

I’ve said for a while now that it feels like 2025 becomes the year that crypto companies become more than just crypto companies.

What we’re seeing with Polymarket and Crypto[dot]com, as well as Robinhood’s ambition to enter the sports event trading market, is just the tip of the iceberg.

My prediction (not to be found on any event trading market) is that the CFTC create regulatory clarity within this space by the end of the year, and potentially within 6 months. That’s not based on anything other than the speed they have moved with since September on this topic.

They have moved quickly so far, and after their investigation of Polymarket is concluded — alongside the precedent we have seen with Kalshi’s regulatory battles — I think we could begin to see the formation of a framework that allows for these companies to operate compliantly.

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