The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the National Basketball Association signed a cooperation agreement on Monday under which the two will share information on matters that could affect the integrity of professional basketball, closing a gap that had left the league with no window into the fast-growing prediction markets where fans trade contracts on its games.
Under the memorandum of understanding, signed by CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the agency and the league will communicate regularly and discuss integrity matters, with the stated aim of keeping prediction markets fair and transparent. Selig said the deal continues the Commission's commitment to increasing data sharing between the agency and professional sports leagues. "The NBA joins the MLB and NHL in taking a responsible step toward protecting sports integrity and market participants from abuses in prediction markets like insider trading and fraud," he said.
The problem the agreement answers is straightforward. Prediction markets had grown into a major channel for trading on NBA games while sitting outside the monitoring net the league built with licensed sportsbooks. Earlier this month the NBA worked with its sportsbook partners — which the league says cover about 99 percent of the United States sports betting market — to pull bet types it considered vulnerable to manipulation. The prediction markets were not part of that arrangement and had no commercial agreement with the league, leaving trading on its games in a space the league could not see into.
Alongside the regulator deal, the NBA named Kalshi and Polymarket its preferred prediction market exchanges. The two platforms will receive official NBA data, supplied by Sportradar, the league's designated data distribution partner, to settle authorized markets, and they gain rights to use NBA intellectual property and run promotions in the United States. In return, the league keeps a say over what is traded on its games: the agreements limit the types of markets the exchanges may offer, ban NBA and team personnel from trading NBA event contracts, and require the platforms to cooperate with investigations into suspicious trading and to share information when the league asks.
"Protecting the integrity of the game is our top priority," said Scott Kaufman-Ross, the NBA's head of media distribution and partnerships. He said the league is in a better position to protect its games in a regulated market where trading is transparent, can be monitored, and the league has insight into what is happening. The league also expanded its existing agreement with DraftKings to cover prediction markets and said it expects to announce similar arrangements with other operators in the coming weeks.
The NBA is the third major North American league to sign such an agreement with the CFTC, after Major League Baseball in March and the National Hockey League in May. The National Football League has held back: it has no cooperation agreement with the agency, has pressed the CFTC for tougher rules on game integrity, consumer safety and insider-trading controls, and has backed a request for the Supreme Court to review who should oversee sports-related prediction market contracts.
The signing lands in the middle of a court fight over who governs these markets. The CFTC maintains that most prediction market contracts are swaps that fall under its exclusive jurisdiction. A long list of states argues the opposite — that the platforms are running unlicensed gambling that breaks state gaming laws and avoids state taxes — and states have sued and moved against the exchanges across the country. Federal appeals courts have split: the Sixth Circuit ruled against Kalshi in September in cases involving Ohio and Tennessee, following a similar Ninth Circuit decision, while the Third Circuit allowed Kalshi to keep operating in New Jersey while its appeal proceeds. The Supreme Court has been asked to take up the New Jersey dispute, with 39 states and Washington, D.C., supporting the request, and Utah's attorney general sued Kalshi on October 20, seeking to recover an estimated $30 million to $60 million in profits the state says the platform earned there.
The integrity stakes are not theoretical. In April 2024 the NBA banned Jontay Porter for life over gambling violations after sportsbooks flagged suspicious patterns on prop bets about him — the kind of flag the league now wants raised in prediction markets too. The deals also follow a run of sports betting scandals, including the arrest of more than 30 people last year in connection with a federal probe into illegal gambling. For American fans, the fight decides whether trading on games is policed under one federal framework or fifty state ones — and whether the leagues themselves get a seat inside the market or keep watching it from outside.
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