Winter Star

What is Winter Star?

As Macquarie analyst Chad Beynon points out, prediction markets generated $4.3 billion in taker volume during the first week of September without any help from the NFL, building on momentum from the 2026 World Cup. However, the NFL’s impact was immediate, with taker volume hitting a daily record during Week 1 of the campaign.

With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that Macquarie expects sports event contracts will drive approximately 80% of taker volume this year, but Beynon sees other categories growing over the long term.

“We expect non-sports categories such as economics, politics, crypto, and entertainment to gain share over time,” says the analyst.

How to play Winter Star

Up to 1,124 occurrences of virtual currencies being used were discovered by Spectrum, which added up to 11.5% of the sessions included in the spreadsheet provided by Evolution.

“Spectrum notes that Evolution relies upon its clients to develop and implement these additional AML and KYC procedures. Further, Evolution does not review the operator’s compliance with this requirement of enhanced due diligence,” the report says of Evolution’s compliance processes for preventing the use of virtual currencies.

The full Spectrum Gaming Capital report can be accessed here.

How to play Winter Star

Online casino games remained the largest segment of the remote market, generating £5.7 billion ($7.6 billion) in GGY, with slots accounting for £4.8 billion ($6.4 billion) of that total.

Remote sports betting generated £2.4 billion ($3.2 billion), led by football at £1.2 billion ($1.6 billion) and horseracing at £769.3 million ($1.03 billion).

Despite the increase in remote GGY, new account registrations fell 3% to 32.4 million. There were 25.7 million active accounts at the end of the final reporting quarter.