Crank It Up

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What else can Netherlands gambling operators do to stop the flow of players offshore? Holland Casino is a member of online gambling trade association VNLOK which represents 90% of the licensed operators, and Petra answers simply: “If we knew the answer, we would try to reach it.

“What I do think is that deciding together, not only as operators, but together with politicians and stakeholders, that a legal market is very important to get that done. We’re not there yet, and that’s what we’re saying.

“An unregulated market doesn’t become a safe market. People will always gamble, so we have to make sure that we have a strong legal market. And so you also need to give us some room to exist. And of course, we need to be regulated. A regulated market is always better than an illegal market.”

How to play Crank It Up

Another bettor noted that gambling debts fractured personal relationships: “Sports betting ruined my six years of friendship because I couldn’t pay back the borrowed loan from my friend. He stopped talking to me.”

Americans wagered nearly $167 billion on sports in 2025 through regulated sportsbooks, an 11% increase year-over-year, according to data from the American Gaming Association (AGA).

The blurring line between financial investing and gambling has been accelerated by the rise of prediction markets—exchanges offering event contracts that are federally regulated as financial derivatives. U.S. News found that over 40% of active sports bettors now also participate in sports prediction markets.

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“We need to establish a baseline, implement the change, measure it and see whether it goes up by 10%. If it only goes up by 1%, maybe we need another iteration because we haven’t fulfilled the objective.”

The next development is increasingly being driven by Cubeia’s customers. Now the company is asking what customers will want to do with AI, Grenstad explains.

“We [recently] started asking, ‘What does this mean for the customer? What can the customer actually do with this?’ And I think we would have continued looking for that answer if the customer hadn’t come to us and said: ‘Can we let our AI agent deal with your data streams and use your platform?'”