FIFA’s $150M Prediction-Market Partner Faces Questions Over $108M in Trades

A prediction-market platform with alleged links to the Abu Dhabi royal family is facing questions over whether much of its trading volume was artificially inflated.

ADI PredictStreet first raised eyebrows last April after it reportedly paid more than $150 million to become the “Official Prediction Market Partner of the FIFA World Cup 2026,” despite not yet being operational. Gibraltar had granted the company a gambling license just days earlier, in what officials described as record time.

Now, an investigation by The Wall Street Journal has found that around $108 million of the $167 million traded on ADI Predictstreet through late September came from a network of cryptocurrency wallets funded by a single crypto wallet that also collected the platform’s trading fees.

More strikingly, the network accounted for 99% of all trading on the platform since late August, suggesting that relatively little activity came from independent customers.

Trading With Themselves?

The findings raise questions about the legitimacy of trading volumes reported by a company that secured one of international soccer’s most lucrative advertising platforms despite being virtually unknown before this year’s World Cup.

Three Harvard University researchers identified the network of 795 wallets through an analysis of publicly available blockchain transactions. According to the Journal, the accounts traded almost exclusively with one another.

During the World Cup itself, just two wallets reportedly generated more than $81 million in transactions.

The pattern raises questions about possible “wash trading,” where coordinated accounts repeatedly buy and sell assets to create the impression of genuine market activity.

Such transactions can inflate reported trading volumes, making a platform appear busier and more successful than it really is. However, the findings are not conclusive proof of wrongdoing.

Crucially, they do not establish who controlled the wallets or whether the transactions were deliberately manipulated.

Gibraltar’s gambling commissioner told the Journal that a preliminary review found the company was complying with local rules prohibiting self-trading.

Royal Involvement Disputed

ADI Predictstreet has been linked to International Holding Company, a conglomerate chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, although the company has disputed claims of royal involvement.

When announcing their partnership, FIFA promised safeguards including real-time monitoring of suspicious trading activity and systems for sharing information about potential integrity threats.

It’s unclear whether those safeguards detected the trading patterns uncovered by the Harvard researchers.

ADI PredictStreet did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.