Review: Letter From America 60 shows illegal iGaming now dwarfs the regulated US market

iGaming Future's Letter From America 60 leads with a GCI report estimating the US unregulated iGaming market generated $97.4bn in GGR in 2025, up 45% year on year and ahead of the $78.7bn the AGA attributes to the entire regulated commercial online industry. The newsletter also covers Bally's decision to pause non-gaming parts of its Chicago casino over new VGT rules, Wisconsin's tribal sports betting legal challenge, and the CFTC's warning about American odds format on prediction markets.

The centrepiece is hard to overstate: if GCI's AI- and traffic-based modelling is anywhere near right, the illegal market is not a fringe problem but the majority of US online gambling. The report's argument that legal expansion, without enforcement, simply grows the total addressable market runs directly against the supply-side logic that most state legalisation bills are built on. That is a challenge to regulators, licensed operators and investors who have assumed legal supply would naturally shrink the black market.

The other items reinforce the same theme of definitional chaos. Wisconsin's dispute over whether a bet occurs on tribal land echoes the Florida case that handed the Seminole Tribe a 30-year statewide monopoly. The CFTC's attempt to police odds formats, and the NCPG's defence of accepting Kalshi money while describing prediction markets as functionally gambling, show how blurred the line between regulated gambling and unregulated financial products has become. Heather Maurer's point that "anyone who profits from gambling has an ethical and economic obligation to help mitigate the harm it can create" is the strongest line in the piece.

What to watch next: whether any state or federal body acts on the GCI figures, the outcome of the Wisconsin litigation, and whether other problem-gambling groups follow Michigan and Nevada in quitting the NCPG over Kalshi. The full newsletter is worth reading for the detail behind each story — read it at iGaming Future.