Snow Scratcher

What is Snow Scratcher?

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.

Financial advisors continue to urge consumers to view sports wagering strictly as entertainment and to only risk funds they can afford to lose.

What is Snow Scratcher?

“You can try to stop gambling, but then you go onto foreign gambling sites and crypto casinos and they keep appearing,” Madsen says.

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.

What is Snow Scratcher?

He argued the sector should be treated with the same rigour currently applied to cigarettes.

In an interview with Guilherme Amado’s column in Amado Mundo, Durigan said the government of Brazil and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had fulfilled what was defined in the law that established sports betting.

“The legislation mandated the regulation of the sector, which did not happen in the previous administration,” he explained. “We came into government with the sector operating for almost five years.