Next.io Co-Founder Says Insider Trading in Prediction Markets Is ‘the Most Difficult Point to Resolve’

Sportradar ‘Takes Sides’ In Industry Standoff

When Sportradar agreed to supply official data and integrity tooling to Kalshi this month, the move read as a technical milestone. For Pierre Lindh, co-founder and managing director of Next.io and the force behind its NEXTPredict brand, it is something larger. “I think it brings a lot of validation to the prediction market space,” he told Bitcoin.com News, adding that the agreement is “very much at the heart of settlement” – the fast, secure resolution of markets Sportradar has spent two decades standardizing in sports betting. “That has not been the case in the prediction market space until now,” he explained.

Lindh sees a second signal in the deal. The American Gaming Association has been pressuring members not to work with prediction market operators, and several have walked. Against that backdrop, and as partners continue to defect, “it becomes more and more difficult for [the AGA] to hold back companies from working with the prediction markets.” His conclusion: the association “needs to start thinking about revising the kind of zero tolerance policy that they have for prediction market space, because clearly it’s not working.” It’s the bullish framing.

The Sportradar move was followed by an awkward compliance story just days later in the industry press, when Nevada moved to hold Kalshi in contempt over its insufficient geofence that was based on an in-house solution. Lindh – who said he was due to meet GeoComply’s co-founder and chair Anna Sainsbury later that day – was blunt: “GeoComply is the standard, just like Sportradar is the standard for settlement and official data,” highlighting that operators should lean on proven vendors “rather than a DIY solution.” His takeaway was clear:

“I don’t think it’s the right thing to save money on.”

The momentum is real, if easy to overstate. US sports betting remains, as Lindh noted, ” much bigger than the prediction market space” for now, though the gap is closing: based on his insights, the NBA Finals produced near-parity between sports bettors and prediction markets in terms of true handle, though he caveated the comparison himself: “the handle is not apples to apples in that regard, which makes the industry a little bit more difficult to compare.”

The gap between the two figures is mechanical. A sportsbook bet is placed once and settles once, so a $100 wager adds $100 to handle. A prediction-market contract can be bought and sold many times before the event resolves – a trader opens a position, sells it on, the next holder sells again, and each trade is counted. The same dollar of conviction gets tallied repeatedly, inflating the prediction-market handle against a sportsbook’s. That is why raw handle flatters the newer venues, and why revenue or unique volume is the cleaner yardstick.

Real-money World Cup volumes are projected to reach record highs across the sector – though whether the USMNT makes a deep run or not will have a huge impact on domestic totals, so the variance in the forecasts is high.

‘The Most Difficult Point to Resolve’

Ask Lindh where the sector is most exposed, and he reaches for the newsroom rather than the courtroom. The stories that shape public perception, he said, are insider-trading cases and big lawsuits – and prediction markets have shifted from being “mostly hailed as a truth machine” to a chapter in the wider debate about the gamification of America, where “everything is becoming a bet.”

On insider trading, Lindh was unusually candid for someone building a business on the sector’s legitimacy. “This is going to be the sticking point and the most difficult point to resolve,” he said. Stock-market insider trading is “pretty ring-fenced” and traceable, but geopolitical event markets are not: before a country is attacked, “the soldiers are briefed,” and the information spreads outward. “I think it’s an impossible mission to close down the possibility of insider information,” he admitted.

He highlighted a key difference in business structure – and, in turn, the incentives: unlike a sportsbook, which loses money to a bad-faith bettor, a prediction market operator is a neutral intermediary. “If anyone loses or wins, it’s not the concern of the platform. They will always make their fee,” Lindh said, so “they don’t have that big incentive to stop insider trading in the same way that the sports betting company has.”

This is also where the Sportradar deal’s limits show: its tooling targets sports-match manipulation, not insider trading on political or geopolitical contracts, which is where the loudest scandals sit. In a 2025 interview, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan suggested on CBS News’ 60 Minutes program that insiders “having an edge to the market is a good thing,” arguing the activity speeds the discovery of truth. The company has since flipped on that stance, updating its rules in March 2026 to ban trades on stolen confidential information, cooperating with authorities on high-profile cases like Maduro raid commando Gannon Ken Van Dyke’s bets.

The countermeasures are limited, he said: they ban politicians and military personnel, but “if you are active military service personnel, you can just tell your brother about this information,” and “that person can make the trade instead.” This, of course, would constitute a straightforward case of insider trading in a stock-market context. Tightening too far carries its own cost. In a fiercely competitive market, bans that thin out the trading pool are self-defeating, because “the operators that have the most liquidity are the ones that can offer the best product.”

The result is “a catch-22 for the operators,” Lindh said, and his verdict is bleak: “with the nature of the world being so chaotic as it is, it’s very, very hard to stop.”

The Road Into Europe – and Beyond Prediction Markets

The valuations only make sense, Lindh argued, once you see the cultural split. Europeans “will see sports betting” when they look at the prediction-market product, while “the Americans are more raised as traders,” and their reference points are “competition in Robinhood or competition in Coinbase,” not a bookmaker. As Lindh sees it, this is why “Flutter is floating around [a] $18 billion market cap whereas [Kalshi] is $22 billion,” and why investors “think that [Kalshi] is the next Robinhood.”

For Europe, Lindh sees one realistic doorway. Malta is “the only jurisdiction in Europe that is thinking of regulating this product as a financial derivative product,” a classification that could open the whole EU, and “all the big ones are exploring Malta as a potential jurisdiction of interest.” (Next.io hosted Polymarket at its Malta conference weeks earlier.)

The optimism runs into recent precedent, though. Europe’s top court has recently affirmed that member states can ban gambling products regardless of another country’s license – and so long as national regulators keep treating prediction markets as gambling, as the Netherlands did with Polymarket this month, a Maltese classification may not travel as cleanly as operators hope if the financial-derivative framing remains as contentious on the old continent as it is today.

Further out, Lindh expects that operators will stop “seeing themselves as prediction markets companies, but more as derivative companies,” and “they’ll start merging into Robinhood-type products eventually.” He also expects US states to go with a tax-rather-than-ban approach in the medium term.

For now, Lindh remains a user as much as an analyst. A Swede, he is “hoping that Sweden will win” the World Cup and admits he checks the markets constantly during matches – “a hundred times a day probably.” The rationale is more human than you might expect: “It’s always fun to play some trades.” For an industry still fighting over whether it is finance or gambling, that may be the most honest answer of all.