Novig’s parent, Ludlow Exchange LLC, has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to stop Wisconsin’s Department of Justice from using the state’s gambling laws to block the company’s sports event-contract business in Wisconsin.
The complaint says Novig is not engaged in gambling. Instead, it says, the company is “providing sports-based event contracts to customers across the United States,” and those contracts are derivatives regulated exclusively by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The filing argues that “the field here is not gambling” and that Congress gave the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over trading on designated contract markets. It says Wisconsin’s threatened action could expose Novig to criminal liability under state law, including a Class I felony.
Novig entered the Wisconsin market in the first week of August, according to the lawsuit. The company says it went to court because the Department of Justice could bring an enforcement case based on what it called a false claim that Novig is violating state gambling laws.
As reported earlier this month, Novig had already sued New York over similar state gambling rules, underscoring how the fight over prediction markets is spreading across the country.
Wisconsin has already taken a hard line. On April 23, the state filed three lawsuits against online prediction market companies, accusing them of working together to facilitate illegal sports betting throughout the state. Attorney General Josh Kaul said then that sports betting and other forms of commercial gambling have long been illegal in Wisconsin, and that no company is above the law.
The state’s earlier suits targeted firms including Crypto.com, and Wisconsin said its goal was to shut down the platforms in the state. A Wisconsin DOJ communications director later referred questions about Novig’s lawsuit to that April press release.
The broader conflict has drawn in the CFTC as well. In April, the agency sued Wisconsin in response to the state’s cases, saying Congress assigned it exclusive jurisdiction over event contracts traded on designated contract markets. In a June proposal, the CFTC said prediction markets are rapidly increasing in popularity and that trading volume across CFTC-registered prediction markets exceeded $25 billion in 2025.
