Betr has made a smart move to break into prediction markets by acquiring Ascent Capital Management Inc., a daily fantasy operator that comes with NFA and CFTC registration already attached. No lengthy application wait. No bureaucratic delays.

It’s clever regulatory strategy, frankly. Rather than spend months grinding through a direct NFA membership application, Betr now operates as a CFTC-registered introducing broker. This lets the company offer federally regulated event contracts through designated contract markets like Kalshi and Crypto.com’s derivatives platform. Fanatics pulled the same trick last year with Paragon Global Markets. It works.

Avoiding the Long Road

The reason this matters becomes clear once you understand how long NFA approval actually takes. Betr filed its application back in October and watched seven months pass with nothing to show for it. That’s a serious drag on business momentum. DraftKings got approved in roughly six months; PrizePicks in about four. Betr’s timeline suggests the process is genuinely unpredictable.

As an introducing broker, Betr sidesteps that problem entirely. The trade-off? The company won’t hold customer funds directly. But it gains immediate market access through partnerships with established exchanges. Worth the compromise.

What This Means for Users

Joey Levy, Betr’s founder and CEO, sees this as a natural next step for the company. Prediction markets are something genuinely different from traditional sports betting or daily fantasy. They’re financial instruments dressed up as entertainment, which is why the feds take notice. Launching these through Betr’s super app later this year taps into real user demand for this emerging category.

The Ascent deal also shows how fast acquisitions can bulldoze through regulatory bottlenecks in this space. Fanatics proved the concept. Betr’s now running with the same blueprint, already having launched online casino operations across 30 states back in March. The company is scaling hard across multiple product lines.

For players, this means another major operator stepping into a market that’s still taking shape. Prediction markets aren’t mainstream yet, but with Fanatics, DraftKings, and now Betr all moving in? That could change fast.