Where the map is being redrawn
The state-by-state framework described in this course was built for products that sit still: a sportsbook licensed in a state, a casino app that works within its borders. The products that have grown fastest since 2023 do not sit still. Sweepstakes casinos offer slots in states with no online casino law; prediction markets offer sports contracts in states with no sports betting law; daily fantasy pick'em products offer something that looks like player props under the fantasy exemption; and skill-game machines fill convenience stores under the argument that they are not gambling at all. Each exploits a boundary in the framework, each has drawn a state response, and one of them has become a federal constitutional fight. This lesson covers the four frontiers and the federal proposals that hover over all of them.
Sweepstakes casinos
The sweepstakes model separates the purchase from the prize. A customer buys "gold coins" that have no cash value and receives "sweeps coins" free with the purchase (and by mail-in request, which is the legal fig leaf); sweeps coins are played on casino games and can be redeemed for cash prizes. Because no purchase is necessary to obtain sweeps coins, the operator argues that the cash-prize element is a sweepstakes promotion, lawful under state promotional law, rather than gambling, which requires consideration. The model grew from social casino roots into a multi-billion-dollar sector by 2024, serving every state without online casino and several with it.
The reaction came in 2025. State attorneys general and regulators issued cease-and-desist orders; class actions alleging illegal gambling multiplied; and legislatures moved to prohibit the model expressly, with Montana, Connecticut, Nevada, New Jersey, New York and California enacting bans in 2025 and other states following in 2026. The industry's largest operators withdrew from the banning states, the sector's trade association has argued for licensing rather than prohibition, and the states with legal online casino have been the most hostile, since sweepstakes compete with licensed, taxed products. The Sweepstakes and Social Casino course covers the model in detail; for regulation, the trajectory is clear: a product that existed in a gap is being legislated out of it, state by state, and a licensed sweepstakes regime has not emerged anywhere.
Prediction markets
Event contracts are binary derivatives: a contract that pays one dollar if an event occurs and nothing if it does not, traded on an exchange at prices that express probability. Registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as designated contract markets, exchanges listed contracts on economic data, then on elections (upheld in litigation in 2024), and from early 2025 on sporting events: who wins a game, a championship, a tournament. Because the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction over derivatives on registered exchanges, the exchanges argue that state gambling law is preempted: a sports contract on a federal exchange is available in all fifty states, including the ones that never legalised sports betting, with no state licence, no state tax and no tethering.
States, tribes and the licensed industry disagree, and the fight has moved through every forum. State regulators in Nevada, New Jersey, Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts, Arizona and others issued cease-and-desist orders in 2025; the exchanges sued for injunctions; district courts split; and the appellate courts have now split too. The Third Circuit held in April 2026 that sports event contracts are swaps within the CFTC's exclusive jurisdiction and that New Jersey's gambling laws are likely preempted. The Ninth Circuit held in August 2026, in the Nevada case, the opposite. Petitions for Supreme Court review were filed in September 2026 by New Jersey and by exchanges, and the question is likely to be decided there. Meanwhile a federal court in Arizona enjoined that state from enforcing its gambling laws against contracts on registered exchanges, at the request of the CFTC and the Department of Justice, and a Massachusetts state court rejected the swaps argument in the state's own suit.
The CFTC's position has itself moved: from proposing in 2024 to prohibit contracts on sports and elections, to withdrawing that proposal, to proposing in June 2026 a framework of public-interest determinations that would permit sports contracts with limits (excluding, for example, contracts on injuries and certain player-level events). Tribes are the most determined opponents, because a federal instrument bypasses the exclusivity their compacts bought. The Prediction Markets course covers the product and the market; for regulation, the outcome will determine whether the state-by-state framework for sports betting survives or whether a federal channel runs alongside it.
Daily fantasy pick'em and skill games
Daily fantasy sports operated under UIGEA's fantasy exemption and state fantasy laws for a decade, but the "pick'em" format that grew after 2020 (choose whether several players will go over or under a statistical line, against the house) looks like a parlay of player props, and state regulators said so: Florida, Michigan, New York, Wyoming, Maryland, Ohio and others ordered the products withdrawn or restructured in 2023 and 2024, and operators moved to peer-to-peer formats or to sportsbook licences where available. The line between fantasy and betting is drawn by each state and is still moving.
Skill-game machines (terminals offering games with a nominal skill element, placed in bars and convenience stores) are a land-based frontier with online implications: Pennsylvania's courts have ruled on their legality repeatedly, Virginia banned and then partly permitted them, and the industry's argument that skill takes a game outside gambling law is the same argument that fantasy operators and, in India, real-money gaming operators made. The skill-versus-chance boundary is the oldest in gambling law and is being litigated in every new form.
Federal proposals
Congress has not legislated on gambling since UIGEA in 2006, and the proposals of the 2020s show the shape of what might come. The SAFE Bet Act, introduced in 2024 and reintroduced since, would set federal minimum standards for sports betting (advertising restrictions, affordability checks, limits on in-play betting and on the use of artificial intelligence in marketing) as a condition of a state's programme; it has not advanced. Proposals to repeal the federal excise tax on wagers recur. Bills on prediction markets, both to prohibit sports contracts and to confirm federal jurisdiction, have been introduced. And the 2025 tax legislation's limitation of gambling loss deductions to 90 per cent produced a bipartisan repeal effort that had not passed as at September 2026.
The constitutional constraint from Murphy v NCAA runs through all of them: Congress may regulate sports betting directly, may attach conditions to federal law, and may preempt state law, but may not order states what to do. A federal framework, if one ever comes, will be a federal licence or federal standards, not a federal instruction to the states.
What it means for operators
An operator in the American market now plans for three regulatory tracks. The state track: licences, tethering, tax and compliance in the states that have legalised, as the earlier lessons describe. The federal track: a possible national channel for sports contracts under the CFTC, which every large sportsbook operator has positioned for by registering as, partnering with, or acquiring a derivatives exchange or futures commission merchant. And the boundary track: sweepstakes, fantasy and skill products that exist in gaps and are being closed, which a licensed operator avoids and monitors. The tribes sit across all three as counterparties, competitors and litigants.
What to take from this lesson
The fast-growing products of the 2020s live at the framework's boundaries. Sweepstakes casinos are being prohibited state by state after 2025. Prediction markets' sports contracts have split the circuit courts (Third Circuit for federal preemption in April 2026, Ninth Circuit against in August 2026) and are headed for the Supreme Court, with the CFTC proposing a permissive framework and tribes leading the opposition. Fantasy pick'em products were pushed out of several states as disguised props, and skill games test the oldest boundary in gambling law. Federal proposals (minimum standards, excise repeal, prediction-market bills, loss-deduction repeal) have not passed, and Murphy limits any federal framework to regulation and preemption rather than commands to states.