I have spent the last three decades advising operators, suppliers and investors across the global gaming and sports betting industry. In that time I have watched categories emerge, mature and consolidate. I have also watched structural gaps in the value chain persist for years before somebody finally builds the answer.

The current state of prediction markets and sportsbooks is one of those gaps. Today, with the opening of Tater’s public beta, that gap closes.

What I have been watching for

The convergence between regulated sports betting and federally regulated prediction markets is no longer a thesis. It is the operating reality of the industry. Polymarket and Kalshi together processed more than $45 billion in volume in 2025. US sports betting handle has exceeded $150 billion. Sports event contracts now account for the majority of Kalshi’s trading activity. DraftKings has announced a unified app combining sportsbook and prediction market access across all 50 states. Fanatics, FanDuel, Crypto.com and others have launched their own prediction market offerings inside the past 18 months.

The same users are increasingly active across both categories. The same events are increasingly priced in both venues. And yet the fundamental discovery experience for those users has been broken in a specific way: no independent layer has surfaced the full picture across both prediction markets and sportsbooks in a single view. Each operator shows its own prices. Each aggregator shows only one side of the convergence. The consumer who wants to understand what the market actually thinks has had to assemble that picture in their head, app by app.

That is the gap. And it is the gap that I believe defines the next significant value creation moment in this industry.

What Tater is, and why it matters now

Tater (www.taterit.com) is the first independent cross-platform discovery, price comparison and data infrastructure layer for prediction markets and sports betting. It aggregates live markets and odds across 16 venues spanning prediction markets and US-licensed sportsbooks. It surfaces the full picture in real time. It does so as an operator-agnostic information service, holding no user funds and facilitating no wagers, which means it has no structural conflict with the operators it covers.

What strikes me most about the product is that it does not serve one audience. It serves three simultaneously, each of whom needs the cross-platform view for different reasons, and each of whom has been underserved for the same structural reason until now.

Consumers get a mobile-first discovery experience with AI-powered natural language thesis search that translates beliefs into actionable opportunities across all 16 platforms. Live beta queries have ranged across sports, crypto, geopolitics and culture, returning cross-platform odds in one unified view.

B2B partners, including operators, modellers, analysts and affiliates, get an API surface that delivers normalised cross-platform data without each of them building their own integrations. Tater’s API is already live and powering external machine learning products. The same pipeline drives Tater Prediction Market Research, the institutional analytics output of the platform, which recently delivered a cross-platform study covering more than 3,000 prediction markets and over $229 million in combined volume across Kalshi and Polymarket.

Content creators, including sportscasters, analysts and commentators, get cross-platform intelligence as commentary infrastructure. Tater is in active pilot discussions with a leading sports content creator network to power World Cup content with proprietary cross-platform data that no single-platform feed can offer.

Three audiences. One layer. That structural position is what makes Tater a category-defining product, not just a useful one.

Proof from the field: NCAA Final Four 2026

In April 2026, ahead of the Arizona versus Michigan Final Four matchup, Tater surfaced something no single platform could. Polymarket and Kalshi had Arizona effectively level with Michigan at 50-51%, while DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, BetRivers and BetOnline all priced Michigan as the favourite at 56-58%. A six to eight percentage point directional disagreement across seven platforms, invisible to anyone checking a single app. Michigan won 91-73. The sportsbook consensus was correct, vindicated by an 18-point final margin.

That single observation has commercial value to a sharp bettor, analytical value to a modeller, and content value to a sportscaster. All three from one layer. That is the operating logic of the product, demonstrated on a live tournament weekend.

What is coming this week

Tater is publishing its first public cross-platform case study this week at taterit.com. The subject is Eurovision 2026. Three major prediction market platforms priced the same contender for 60 days. They collectively missed. The case study examines where, why, and what the cross-platform data reveals about how prediction markets behave around live cultural events. The full dataset and methodology will be published alongside the analysis for independent verification.

This is the first of what I believe should become a standard category of analysis in our industry: cross-platform post-mortems of high-profile events, conducted with the methodological rigour of academic research and the operational urgency of a live news cycle. The methodology applies to elections, sports outcomes, financial events, and any moment where public information arrives in discrete stages.

FIFA World Cup 2026 as the proving ground

The 2026 FIFA World Cup begins on 11-Jun-2026, played across the United States, Mexico and Canada, with widespread legal US sports betting available throughout the tournament. Combined prediction market and sportsbook handle on the tournament is projected to exceed $5 billion globally. Tater will run its real-time cross-platform analytical layer live across all 104 matches, alongside the content partnership pilot.

This is the most significant proving ground the cross-platform discovery thesis could have. If cross-platform intelligence demonstrably outperforms single-platform commentary across a 39-day, 104-match global tournament, the case for the layer becomes self-evident to operators, content partners and investors alike.

US first. Global by design.

The current focus on US prediction markets and US-licensed sportsbooks is the launch point, not the destination. Tater’s matching and aggregation architecture is modular by design and built to absorb new venues as they emerge: international sportsbooks, regulated exchange-based operators, and new prediction market entrants in Europe, Latin America, the UK and Asia. SCCG is supporting Tater on the international expansion roadmap, with our existing operator network across multiple jurisdictions as one of the structural advantages we bring to the partnership.

What this means for the industry

The bifurcation between prediction markets and sportsbooks is becoming less defensible by the month. Philosophically, regulatorily, and commercially, the two categories are converging. The same users are trading across both. The same events are priced on both. And the analytical, content and commercial value of seeing both sides simultaneously now belongs to whoever owns the cross-platform layer.

I am proud to be a co-founder of Tater. I am also confident, as someone whose job is to advise operators on where this industry is going, that the cross-platform discovery layer is one of the most important structural products this category will produce in the next decade.

The Tater public beta is live now at taterit.com. The Eurovision case study publishes later this week. The World Cup begins on 11-Jun-2026.