North Carolina sports betting handle climbs 53 percent as prediction market ban takes hold

In July, seven licensed operators in North Carolina recorded a combined handle of $566.3 million — up sharply from the same month a year earlier, when mobile wagering was still finding its footing after launching in March 2024. Gross revenue came in at $63.2 million. The state's cut was $14 million in estimated tax proceeds.

Those are healthy numbers for a market less than eighteen months old. But the figure that matters for prediction markets sits next to them, not inside them.

Governor Josh Stein signed an executive order in May prohibiting state employees from using information gained through their official duties to participate in prediction markets. The order is framed as an extension of North Carolina's existing Ethics Act, which already bars public workers from trading on non-public information for personal gain. In that framing, it sounds bureaucratic, almost routine. It is not.

The Stein order is the first time a state executive has drawn a direct line between the information asymmetry problem in prediction markets and the specific class of people who hold structural advantages over every other participant: government employees. A staffer at the North Carolina State Lottery Commission knows July's handle figures before they are published. An employee at the Department of Health knows hospitalisation trends before they are released. An aide in the Governor's office knows the shape of an executive decision before it is announced. Prediction markets price all of those things. The order says: you cannot be on both sides of that information gap.

The consensus read on this has been that North Carolina is simply being cautious, extending existing ethics rules into a new product category. I don't think that's where this lands. The Stein order represents the clearest articulation yet of a legal theory that several other states are working toward but have not yet named directly: that prediction markets, because they are information markets, create insider-trading exposure that existing ethics statutes were never designed to cover. The framing as an Ethics Act extension is the tell. It means Stein's legal team concluded they did not need new legislation. They already had the authority. They just applied it.

That has implications well beyond North Carolina's 566 million dollar sports betting month. If state ethics statutes are sufficient to restrict prediction market participation by public employees — without new law, without a gambling commission ruling, without a fight over federal preemption — then every state with a comparable ethics framework already has the same authority. The legal infrastructure for a much broader restriction is sitting dormant in existing statute books.

The sports betting handle will keep growing. North Carolina's trajectory since March 2024 is straightforward and the year-on-year comparison will look strong through the winter as the NFL schedule fills in. That part of the story is predictable. The part that is not is whether another governor picks up Stein's executive order, reads the legal reasoning, and decides the same move costs nothing politically and closes a gap that nobody has adequately explained to the public.