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How to play Happy Scratch
On 16 June, a coalition of gaming lobby groups, state associations and labour unions sent a letter to the Senate urging lawmakers to include language in the bill banning sports and casino-related contracts. Among the signatories were the American Gaming Association, the Indian Gaming Association, the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers and the UNITE HERE unions.
“Litigation may eventually clarify the law, but this is ultimately a question of congressional intent. Congress should not wait while this nationwide expansion of gambling continues,” the letter said. “It should use crypto legislation to reaffirm a simple principle: sports betting falls outside the CFTC’s remit and cannot be offered through prediction market platforms.”
Following the vote, IGA Chairman David Bean said in a statement that the Senate “did the right thing” by not advancing the bill. The Clarity Act “could have expanded CFTC commodities authority” without clear protections, Bean said, but he cautioned that “it is not the end of this fight”.
What is Happy Scratch?
As part of the accord, MLB will supply FutureSports with official league data “that the company will use to create new broad-based CME FutureSports Performance Indexes (FSPI)” on each MLB team. Financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.
CME Group (NASDAQ: CME) and the index provider announced a partnership in July. With the MLB deal in place, the exchange operator will offer derivatives based on the baseball indexes.
“The agreement paves the way for CME Group to list weekly, monthly and quarterly cash-settled futures contracts, pending regulatory review, based on the CME FSPI MLB benchmarks,” according to a statement issued by FutureSports.
How to play Happy Scratch
A website might initially appear to be a normal local site, while behind it sits an iframe, JavaScript redirect or a chain of other pages leading to the actual gambling destination.
“You have to follow that chain,” Madsen says. In some cases, that chain can involve multiple layers. “A site might redirect ten times before reaching the actual destination.”
Madsen describes Trace2Trace as “a large search engine that continuously crawls websites”.
