For sportsbooks
Prediction markets are not a second sportsbook.
They price differently, they hold risk differently, and they settle differently. Parity's catalogue does not contain a single sports market, which is exactly why it can sit beside your book instead of competing with it.
Start here
The two products are related. They are not the same trade.
Both take a view on an uncertain outcome and both pay out on it. Everything past that diverges, and the divergences are the ones an operator cares about most: who prices, who is exposed, what the customer can do with the position before it resolves, and who grades it.
A vendor who calls prediction markets “betting on everything else” is describing the marketing, not the product. Here are the five differences, stated as differences.
- Who sets the price
- A sportsbook prices its own line and carries the margin in the price. A prediction market price is a matched price between participants, expressed as cents on a one-dollar contract: it moves because someone traded, not because a trader moved it. Parity passes that price through with its fees stated separately rather than baked into a number.
- Who holds the risk
- Your book takes the other side of its own lines and manages that exposure. Parity does not warehouse event risk. A position is intended to rest against the connected venue, and the revenue is on the transaction and platform layer rather than on a hold percentage. That is a materially different P&L line for an operator, and it means your trading team is not being asked to price elections.
- What the customer actually holds
- Not a slip that settles at the end. A position in a contract with a live price, marked continuously, which can be exited before the event resolves. The exit executes at a market price rather than at a cash-out figure the house chose to offer.
- What settles it
- A published resolution attached to the contract, on rules the customer can read before they trade, rather than a graded fixture arriving from a results feed. Your grading operation is not extended by a single event.
- What the inventory is made of
- Not fixtures. Elections, rate decisions, macro prints, weather, technology, culture and crypto prices: events with no schedule in common and, in most cases, no relationship to a sporting calendar at all.
There is no sports tab, and it is not a setting.
Sports markets are dropped at ingest and never stored. The test runs on the provider's own metadata (the root sports tag plus every tag referenced by the official league metadata), so a market filed under a league that is missing the root tag is still caught.
It deliberately does not match team names, city names or league acronyms in titles. “Will Boston raise its transit fares?” is a politics market, and “Manchester” is a city before it is a football club. Title matching would quietly delete real inventory to look thorough.
If the league metadata endpoint cannot be reached, the root-tag exclusion still applies. The filter fails closed, because letting sport through would break the premise rather than degrade it.
The differentiator of this product is that it is not your sportsbook. That is enforced at ingest, not in a settings panel.
One deliberate narrowing: esports carries the same root tag as every other sport, so it is excluded by default and re-admitted by an explicit carve-out on the provider's esports tag. Esports wagering is regulated like sport in a number of jurisdictions, so treat that as a product decision to revisit per market rather than a settled one. Tell us if your licence requires it switched off.
Beside the book
Where it earns its place.
Your book
Fixtures and lines
- Priced by your traders, exposure managed by your desk
- Scheduled inventory: a calendar of fixtures
- Margin carried in the price
- Graded from a results feed
Parity, beside it
Events and contracts
- Priced by a market, passed through with fees stated separately
- Unscheduled inventory: elections, macro, weather, crypto, culture
- Fee on the transaction rather than a hold percentage
- Settled on published resolution rules attached to the contract
The practical argument is coverage rather than substitution. A sporting calendar has quiet hours, off-seasons and shoulder weeks; a news cycle does not. And the customer who has a strong opinion about a rate decision is frequently already in your product, with no line to take it to.
If you want a genuinely high-frequency surface for those hours, the recurring five-minute crypto windows roll over continuously and settle on a published reference price.
What you would build
Less than a new sport, by some distance.
A server endpoint that maps a signed-in customer to a session, the embedded surface itself, and a webhook endpoint for settlement. Your wallet stays the single authoritative balance: no second account, no transfer step, and no new grading or trading operation.
The full division of responsibility, including the money contract and what never crosses the boundary, is on embedded prediction markets. If your team would rather render it themselves, the API is the other shape.
One thing stated plainly: no commercial arrangement with any venue is implied by anything on this page.
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Tell us which jurisdictions you hold and what your licence permits, and we will tell you what of this is available to you and what is not.