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The historic showdown between the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers will take place at a venue located 7,971 miles from Levi’s Stadium, home of the last meeting between the NFC West rivals. Both teams are based in California, a fertile ground for prediction markets given a sports betting ban in a state with more than 39 million residents. But the Americans in attendance for Thursday night’s matchup (Friday in Melbourne) will not be able to live-trade from their seats.

That is because trading on prediction markets is illegal down under, according to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, the nation’s regulator on financial services. Last month, in perhaps the ASIC’s strongest warnings yet against the asset class, the commission reiterated that prediction markets are not licensed as financial markets to operate in Australia. Through the guidance, the regulator urged consumers to exercise caution before partaking in certain investments on offshore platforms which have not obtained licensing nationwide.

The advisory could be music to the ears of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, whose league has pushed a federal derivatives regulator in the US to enact more rigorous standards to help protect the integrity of professional sports. Ahead of the matchup, Goodell spoke with CNBC from Melbourne.

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He began watching regulators shut down individual gambling sites, only for mirror sites, cloned domains and replacement URLs to emerge in thier place. The problem, he concluded, was not necessarily the individual website. It was the network behind it.

“Why not use the dataset I already have on gambling sites to map the most problematic ones, identify how they are connected and build a deeper picture of the networks behind them?” That thought process eventually gave birth to Trace2Trace.

Trace2Trace is relatively new, but Madsen says its underlying dataset has already grown to around 620,000. And it continues to grow, highlighting the scale of illegal operations in the gambling industry.

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