Blog
ifrah on igaming
image description

A Blog About Online Gaming and Entertainment Regulations

The Upside to the College Betting Scandals
July 21, 2023

The Upside to the College Betting Scandals

By: Steven Eichorn
In May 2023, several high-profile sports betting scandals involving collegiate athletic personnel, including both coaches and players, came to light, spawning discussions about the relationship between sports integrity and sports betting. Two months after those reports, NCAA President Charlie Baker indicated that the NCAA has found 175 infractions of its sports-betting and gambling policy since 2018, with an additional 17 ongoing investigations. On its surface, such statistics seem to indicate a worrying lack of integrity in college sports that is the result of sports betting proliferation; the thought behind this being that the now-ubiquity of betting and wagering opportunities increases the probability of match-fixing and manipulation. Instead, the opposite is true: sports betting legalization and regulation promotes sports integrity by means of superior detection methods via specialized data analytics and integrity monitoring companies, robust Know-Your-Customer procedures, and the reduction of illegal gambling operations’ market shares. The high number of infractions in the NCAA’s report are a result of the sports betting industry’s increased ability to detect infractions because of sports betting... Read more
Ripple Decision Shakes Up US Crypto
July 14, 2023

Ripple Decision Shakes Up US Crypto

By: George Calhoun and Jake Gray

In an apparent boon to the cryptocurrency and broader blockchain industries, a judge in the US District Court for Southern New York ruled on Thursday that Ripple Labs Inc. did not violate federal securities laws in the offering and sale of the XRP token on public exchanges, meaning that the token could be relisted on… Read More

Thinking of Starting Your Own DFS Company?
July 3, 2023

Thinking of Starting Your Own DFS Company?

By: Sara Dalsheim

The expansion of daily fantasy sports (“DFS”) is on the rise in the United States. As the country prepares for the 2023-24 NFL season, it is around this time we see new products come to the market. Unlike sports betting, launching a DFS product has less regulatory barriers. Although, there are a few key states… Read More

Today, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a decision in West Flagler Associates, Ltd. v. Haaland, that will have meaningful implications for the future of online sports betting in Florida along with the interpretation of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (“IGRA”). By way of background, in the spring of 2021, the State… Read More

Ifrah Law on Web3: Web3 Gaming
June 29, 2023

Ifrah Law on Web3: Web3 Gaming

By: Jake Gray

What We’ve Covered In the initial two blog posts of this series, we explored the fundamentals of the World Wide Web, focusing on its iterative issues and solutions as the technology evolved. We charted the history of the Web briefly, from its early stages of relatively isolated, static, and read-based websites to today’s rather centralized,… Read More

During the debate to legalize sports wagering in the United States opponents claimed that it would lead to increased corruption and match fixing in sports. However, Sportsradar’s annual Betting Corruption and Match-Fixing Integrity Services Report for 2022[1] revealed that the number of suspicious matches has declined in North America. According to the Report the number… Read More

Recently, the NFL suspended five players for violations of the league’s gambling policy. Three players received indefinite bans (with the right to apply for reinstatement after the 2023 season) because they were caught betting on NFL games in the 2022 season, while two other players received six-game suspensions for betting on non-NFL games at a… Read More

For bookmakers, who have honed their tools of prediction since the dawn of sports betting, artificial intelligence seems like a natural fit. With a diverse array of AI and AI-adjacent products reaching the market, sports betting operators are primed to exploit these technological developments to offer new and better products to their users. As these… Read More

From April 12th to April 14th, NFT.NYC held its fourth inaugural event since its launch in 2019, boasting more than 1,500 speakers across seven different categories and a featured section. Moving from an array of venues spread throughout Times Square to a centralized location North Javits, Hudson Yards, the event was significantly less well attended… Read More

Ifrah Law on Web3: Web3.0’s Solutions
April 19, 2023

Ifrah Law on Web3: Web3.0’s Solutions

By: Jake Gray

At issue in Web2.0 was the centralization of web platforms and protocols under a user-independent authority, and therefore users’ inability to meaningfully exert control over their web experience, interactions, and data. While such a dynamic provided significant benefits in making the web accessible to a much wider population by lowering the technical barrier to entry,… Read More