HISTORY
Founded in 2012, DraftKings started off as a baseball competition company. It caught the attention of Major League Baseball (MLB) a year later, which would become the first US professional sports organisation to invest in daily fantasy sports.
By 2015, DraftKings was the official daily fantasy sports partner of both MLB and the National Hockey League (NHL).
Later that year, the Gambling Commission granted DraftKings a licence to operate in the UK, which led to the company opening an office in London and launching daily fantasy football products in 2016. In addition to this, DraftKings has since obtained a controlled skill games licence from Malta, which can support the company should it wish to expand into further European Union markets.
A merger with FanDuel was stopped in 2017 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which claimed the combined entity would have over 90% of the American daily fantasy sports market. This monopoly position led the FTC to threaten both DraftKings and FanDuel.
Only three months after the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, DraftKings opened up its first sportsbook product in the state of New Jersey in August 2018.
Since then, further sportsbooks and betting operations have opened up in Massachusetts, New York, West Virginia, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi and many more states.
In 2020, DraftKings completed a reverse merger with SBTech Global, a European sports betting supplier, and Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp, a special-purpose acquisition company.
This transformed DraftKings into a publicly traded company, which trades its company shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange under "DKNG."
Following this, it was announced in 2022 that DraftKings has acquired Golden Nugget Online Gaming, the online casino and sports betting operator.
PRODUCTS
Launched as DraftKings' first product, the daily fantasy sports segment of the company is still undoubtedly the strongest. The premise is similar to traditional fantasy sports betting, where players build a team out of real-life athletes and scores depend on how well each athlete does in the season. However, the timeframe of daily fantasy sports is much shorter, so players in daily fantasy sports compete between each other, based on statistical performances and sometimes RNG.
There are over 12 different sporting leagues that players can choose from, including the National Football League (NFL), NASCAR, National Basketball Association (NBA), F1 and esports.
DraftKings daily fantasy sports does not operate in
- Washington
- Idaho
- Montana
- Nevada
- Hawaii
- Oregon
The DraftKings sportsbook operates strictly within North America, including Ontario, Canada. Players can wager on a variety of sports, including baseball, basketball, football, soccer and motorsports.
DraftKings Sportsbook does not operate in
- Arkansas
- California
- Delaware
- Florida
- Maine
- Montana
- Nevada
- North Carolina
- Rhode Island
The DraftKings casino has a variety of table, slots and live dealer games, culminating in a total of over 300 titles.
In 2021, DraftKings announced its Marketplace product, an NFT ecosystem that players could use to buy and sell digital collectable tokens. Along with curated NFT drops and secondary-market transactions, customers would have access to exclusive content from DraftKings, including Autograph. The operator also confirmed that any NFT tokens could be withdrawn from the platform into a self-custody wallet.
