Prediction Markets & Sports Betting: DKex & Rothera are here. Could operational consolidation beget a wave of corporate combinations?

Research evidence excerpt

Prediction Markets & Sports Betting: DKex & Rothera are here. Could operational consolidation beget a wave of corporate combinations?

29 June 2026

Prediction Markets, US Entertainment & Digital Assets

Prediction Markets & Sports Betting: DKeX & Rothera are here.

Could operational consolidation beget a wave of corporate

combinations?

The operational consolidation wave is in full swing: in the past eight months, every consumer Ian Moore

+1 917 344 8434 platform that matters has merged the front and back end of the prediction-market stack.

ian.moore@bernsteinsg.com DraftKings acquired the Railbird exchange, Robinhood and Susquehanna built Rothera,

Coinbase bought The Clearing Company a week after launching event contracts, and Flutter

Gautam Chhugani stood up a dual-FCM structure to preserve multi-exchange optionality (Exhibit 1). We

+91 226 842 1416

gautam.chhugani@bernsteinsg.com continue to believe predictions represent the future of all markets. As a result, we argue

that exchanges, sportsbooks and consumer-finance platforms now operate within a single

Nosher Ali Khan competitive landscape. The blurring of the boundaries of competition opens a potential

+1 917 344 8578 set of previously inconceivable strategic combinations: sportsbooks acquiring

nosher-ali.khan@bernsteinsg.com

consumer platforms, exchanges acquiring sportsbooks, and sportsbooks acquiring

one another. If the competitive set is now the entire financial system, perhaps the US Mahika Sapra

+91 226 842 1408 sportsbooks should take another look at each other at their current beaten-down valuations

mahika.sapra@bernsteinsg.com (Exhibit 10).

Sanskar Chindalia Owned exchanges are already pulling revenue back in-house, which makes the

+91 226 842 1445 M&A question tangible rather than hypothetical.