Ahead of this summer’s World Cup, FIFA has a new deal with a prediction-market company.
But the multi-year deal isn’t with either of the two giants in the space, nor with any of the smaller but well-known competitors that have popped up in recent months.
Instead, it’s with an obscure blockchain venture from one of the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates that has yet to launch.
FIFA’s deal, announced April 2, is with ADI Predictstreet, which says it’s launching on April 9. Its Instagram account has only about 135 followers, and made its first post on March 26, one week before the FIFA announcement. Its X account also launched in March 2026.
The company is owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family—the largest and wealthiest of the UAE’s seven emirates—and is run by an executive who settled insider trading charges with the Indian government last year.
The deal was called “exclusive” in a release, suggesting that FIFA will not make a deal with Kalshi or Polymarket, the latter of which is paying MLB up to $300 million to use its official logos. Kalshi declined to comment on whether it has held any talks with FIFA about the World Cup, and Polymarket did not comment.
ADI Predictstreet has thus far only been licensed to operate in Gibraltar, a tiny British territory off the coast of Spain that has been called “Blockchain Rock” for its friendly approach to crypto companies.
It’s the first prediction market licensed in Gibraltar. Nigel Feetham, the government of Gibraltar’s minister for justice, trade, and industry, posted on LinkedIn that ADI’s license was granted in “record time.” He did not respond to a request for further comment.
FIFA declined to comment. Messages to ADI Predictstreet and IHC were not returned.
The press release announcing the deal touted a “comprehensive integrity monitoring framework” to protect against suspicious trading activity while ensuring “transparency, fairness, and the protection of participants.” But it’s not clear whether the company is working with an integrity monitor. They are not working with IC360 or Sportradar, sources familiar with the matter tell Front Office Sports; both companies are working with FIFA on World Cup gambling.
“This is all very fishy,” a veteran sports partnerships executive tells FOS. “If this were a more established operator or someone with a track record in the space, it wouldn’t raise the same questions.”
Ties to Abu Dhabi—and Trump
ADI Predictstreet is part of a tangled web of holding companies that all lead back to the UAE. It is billed as a subsidiary of Finstreet Limited, which is owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family’s International Holding Company. It’s built on a new blockchain called ADI Chain, which is run by the nonprofit ADI Foundation; that was founded by Sirius International Holding, which is also owned by IHC.
The International Holding Company is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ president and ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Tahnoon oversees a business empire of more than $1.3 trillion. (Another brother, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, owns soccer clubs including Manchester City and New York City FC through other Emirati-linked companies.)
After Tahnoon visited Trump at the White House in March 2025, the UAE agreed to invest $1.4 trillion in the U.S. over the next decade, largely focused on AI, semiconductors, energy, and manufacturing. The UAE has also become a leader in crypto in recent years, notably welcoming controversial executive Changpeng Zhao and allowing his massive crypto exchange, Binance, to set up a headquarters in Abu Dhabi.
Shortly before Trump’s inauguration last year, a company backed by Tahnoon made a secret $500 million deal to buy 49% of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial.
Just a few months after the investment, in May, the Trump administration greenlit a deal for the UAE to purchase hundreds of thousands of American-made AI chips. Tahnoon’s investment wasn’t reported until a year later by The Wall Street Journal.
World Liberty Financial did not respond to a question about whether it has any involvement with ADI Predictstreet.
Tahnoon, who is the UAE’s national security advisor, has met to discuss Gaza with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East and co-founder of World Liberty Financial. Trump told the UAE president about his “wonderful brother,” and in October pardoned Zhao.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino, meanwhile, is friendly with U.S. president Donald Trump, donning a Trump “USA” hat at a “Board of Peace” meeting, leasing office space in Trump Tower, and giving the president the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize.
Abu Dhabi has hosted the Club World Cup five times, including three times during Infantino’s tenure. Infantino recently met with the Crown Prince of Dubai and announced that the UAE city will host a new annual awards event starting in 2026.
FIFA has more expansive ties to other Gulf states, including to the UAE’s primary regional rival, Qatar, which hosted the 2022 World Cup. And Saudi Arabia put $1 billion behind last year’s expanded Club World Cup and will host the 2034 men’s World Cup. Qatar Airways and Saudi Aramco are official FIFA sponsors.
For Infantino, ADI Predictstreet could be a way into the UAE or Abu Dhabi, which “have huge amounts of capital and investment opportunities” that FIFA may not have previously tapped into, according to Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, the Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
“Infantino has found in Gulf leaders a willing partner, and that has obviously played well with Infantino’s own desire to monetize almost every aspect of FIFA’s operations,” Ulrichsen tells FOS.
Brand New Prediction Market on an Obscure Blockchain
FIFA announced the ADI Predictstreet partnership a week before the platform is set to launch.
Unless there are additional licenses to come, only fans in the 35,000-person island of Gibraltar will be able to legally use ADI Predictstreet during the World Cup, although others could use a VPN.
In the U.S., the process of getting approved by the CFTC typically takes months, Nikhilesh De, who writes about crypto and prediction markets for CoinDesk, tells FOS.
“The fact that FIFA signed an agreement for a product that does not exist, that is definitely odd,” De says.
The infrastructure behind ADI Predictstreet also raises eyebrows.
The prediction market is built on ADI Chain, a blockchain launched in December that says it is “serving governments implementing blockchain infrastructure across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.”
ADI Chain’s token ranks No. 215 by market cap, with 24-hour trading volume of just $1 million per day, according to CoinMarketCap.
Only a small percentage of the coin is currently circulating; publicly available data shows that ADI Chain is holding onto the vast majority of the supply for its own business and investors. Crypto journalist and podcaster David Canellis tells FOS that this type of structure has been used in recent years to pump up a token’s price and allow insiders to sell for a profit.
“In the U.S. and U.K., we’ve learned that these types of projects are very exploitative,” Canellis says. “It just raises the question, ‘Why are you having this structure to begin with that is so heavily skewed towards the insiders?’”
The Executives Behind ADI Predictstreet
When Infantino announced the ADI Predictstreet partnership with two smiling photos on his Instagram account, he appeared next to Ajay Hans Raj Bhatia, identified in press releases as the prediction market’s “principal council member.”
Bhatia has held positions at multiple IHC portfolio companies. Last year, he settled insider trading charges with the Securities and Exchange Board of India after he was accused of buying shares in a group of companies in 2022 shortly before IHC invested $2 billion in them. He accepted a six-month trading ban in the country and paid a $100,000 settlement, but did not admit any wrongdoing.
On Tuesday, ADI Predictstreet announced its new CEO, Greek economist Dimitrios Psarrakis, calling him “recognized among the world’s leading voices in RegTech and blockchain.” Psarrakis wrote on LinkedIn that “Possibly this is the coolest project of my life.”
Psarrakis has ties to the 2022 Qatargate scandal where European politicians were arrested and accused of taking bribes from Qatar ahead of that country hosting the World Cup. Psarrakis co-founded a lobbying group in 2022 with his former boss and co-author, Greek politician Eva Kaili, who was arrested three months later on charges of corruption, participation in a criminal group, and money laundering. That case is still ongoing, and Kaili denies the allegations.
According to Follow The Money, Psarrakis was also himself investigated as European prosecutors probed whether Kaili used fraudulent money to pay her assistants, but he was never charged.
