Sporttrade – Closure Record

01 · The site

A betting exchange, not a bookmaker

Sporttrade Inc. was set up in Philadelphia in 2018 and went live in New Jersey in 2022. It later added Arizona, Colorado, Iowa and Virginia. Every one of those was a proper state licence, held by a company with an office and a named management team. This was not an offshore site.

What made it different was how the betting worked. A normal sportsbook sets the odds and takes the other side of your bet. Sporttrade did not. It matched players against each other at a price out of 100, and that price moved while the game was on. If your side went up, you could sell out for a profit before the final whistle. If it went down, you could sell out and take a smaller loss.

That model has a small, keen following and a lot of people who never got the hang of it. It also costs a lot to run, because you need enough players on both sides at all times for prices to work.

Sporttrade never got close to the size of the big American sportsbooks. It was a small, well-run company. It tried to sell a different product into a market where two companies take most of the money.

02 · The shutdown

A move to prediction markets

On 19 May 2026 Sporttrade announced it was leaving state-licensed sports betting. New Jersey players were given until 25 May 2026. Players in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa and Virginia were given until 25 June 2026. The platform stopped working for everyone on 26 June 2026.

The reason was not a lack of money or a regulator problem. In February 2026 the company applied to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This is the American financial regulator. It applied for the status it would need to run prediction markets. A prediction market lets people trade contracts on whether something will happen. It is overseen as a financial product, not as gambling.

The appeal is simple. A gambling licence has to be won state by state. Each state needs a separate application, a separate tax bill and its own set of rules. A federal financial licence would cover the whole country at once. Sporttrade decided the second route was worth giving up the first.

The company has not gone away. Its old address now points to a page carrying the shutdown notice and the line that something new is coming. As of September 2026, no new product had launched. No new brand name had been announced. As far as we could tell, the application was still outstanding.

03 · The money

Balances posted out as cheques

Players were told to withdraw before their state deadline. Anything left after that was not kept by the company. The shutdown notice says remaining balances were mailed out as cheques to the address held on the account.

That is a better outcome than almost every other closure on this site. Most closed sites put the work on the player and keep whatever is not claimed in time. Sporttrade did the opposite and pushed the money back out on its own.

We still grade the money outcome as unproven. We have read the notice. We have found no complaints about missing payments. But we have no way to check that every cheque was written and every cheque arrived. Anyone whose address had changed since they signed up is the obvious weak point. We have no data on how many people that affected.

If you had an account and never received a cheque, the company still exists. It is regulated in the United States. That gives you somewhere to complain to. The state gaming regulator in whichever state you played in is the place to start.

04 · The receipts

How we verified this record

Every claim on this page is graded by how firmly we could check it. Confirmed means we saw it in the operator’s own notice or in a document that cannot easily be faked. Observed means we saw it ourselves on the live site or domain on the date given. Unconfirmed means it has been reported but we could not prove it.

05 · The questions

Sporttrade – the questions still open