Novig

What it is

Novig is a sports-only event exchange. Contracts priced between $0 and $1 pay $1 if the outcome happens and nothing if it does not, and members trade them against each other on an order book — moneylines, spreads, player props, futures and combinations.

It is the exchange, not a front end for one. The legal entity is Ludlow Exchange, LLC, a Delaware company at 169 Madison Avenue in New York, and the CFTC's register of trading organisations lists it as a designated contract market with a designation date of 16 June 2026. Its CFTC self-certifications describe it as "a registered designated contract market doing business as Novig". The Order of Designation records three representations worth knowing:

• trading is on "an anonymous electronic central limit order book";
• every contract is "cleared on a fully collateralized basis by a derivatives clearing organization";
• the trading model is non-intermediated — the exchange "will not permit any futures commission merchant to intermediate any transactions or carry accounts for customers".

That last point is the structural difference from Robinhood, which is a broker in front of other people's exchanges. Here you are a direct member of the exchange, with no broker layer and no second commission.

Ludlow is not a clearinghouse itself: its member agreement says so in as many words. During signup you are made a clearing member of Bitnomial Clearinghouse, LLC, which is on the CFTC's list of registered derivatives clearing organizations since 15 December 2023. The public CFTC filings refer only to "the Clearinghouse"; the name comes from Novig's own acknowledgement page.

This is a relaunch, not a new company. Until mid-2026 Novig ran a sweepstakes model with two virtual currencies, Novig Coins and Novig Cash. Both are retired. The help centre says all activity now runs through one real-money account and any remaining Novig Cash was converted to US dollars, and the old market rules have been replaced by the contracts' own terms. Anything written about Novig before August 2026 describes a different legal product.

Availability

Every US state except Nevada, Arizona and Michigan, from Novig's eligibility article (last modified 2 September 2026) and its overview page, which name the same three. Four facts sit behind that sentence:

• It is enforced by location, not residence. Eligibility is "based on your physical location at the time you trade — not your billing address, mailing address, or state of residency", and the app checks the device's location each time it is opened to trade. A resident of a blocked state standing in an eligible one can trade; a traveller into one of the three cannot.
• A blocked state freezes the account rather than closing positions. Open positions settle as normal, but you cannot place orders, deposit or withdraw until you leave.
• The minimum age is 21, stated in the help centre and in section 6.1.2 of the member agreement — higher than the 18 that most event-contract venues in this category ask for.
• One account per person, with restriction as the stated penalty for a second one.

Identity verification is required before trading and before any withdrawal is released: legal name, date of birth and address, and in some cases the last four digits of a Social Security number and a photo ID. Nothing in Novig's material offers the product outside the United States.

Pricing

Takers pay, makers do not, and pre-game trades are free for both. Novig's fee article (last modified 1 October 2026) uses one formula for every charge — Fee = Coefficient × Price × (1 − Price) × Number of contracts — and varies only the coefficient:

The maker fee is $0 on every trade type. Fees are charged on the fill and not on winnings: a winning contract pays the full $1.00. Golf and tennis futures carry no fee as of 10 September 2026. The API documentation's own table draws that futures line differently — it lists the futures fee for NFL, MLB and NCAAF and none for PGA, ATP, WTA and UFC, silent on the other leagues — and tells developers to read the fee off each market rather than from any table, which is the honest instruction for both pages.

Makers are paid, through the Maker Credit Program. A resting order filled while an event is live earns 50% of the taker fee collected on the other side; one filled in an eligible futures market earns 70%. The credit is paid as cash within seven days, only when a fee was actually collected, and Novig may change or end the programme at any time. Parlays earn none.

Why the fee fields read 0.75% and −0.375%. The field holds the taker fee at 50 cents as a share of the $1 payout. On a live straight trade that is 0.03 × 0.5 × 0.5 = 0.0075, or 0.75¢ a contract; the maker field is half of it returned, 0.375¢. Those are the live-market figures and the card's comparable number. They are not the whole story: before the game starts the same trade costs nothing either side, and on a futures contract the taker pays double, 1.5¢ at 50¢. A trader who only takes pre-game prices pays no trading fee at all.

Withdrawals go by bank transfer, debit card or Venmo with a $10 minimum, and there is no playthrough requirement on deposits. The withdrawal article names no withdrawal fee. Stablecoin deposits run through a third-party processor, Coinflow, whose charges are not Novig's.

Markets & resolution

Sports only, by design. Novig's help centre lists professional and college football, professional baseball, men's and women's professional and college basketball, professional hockey, golf, tennis, soccer and MMA, with seasonal gaps. There are no politics, economics or culture contracts, and the marketing says so on purpose.

Resolution is rules-based against league data. Contracts settle on "the official result of the underlying sporting event, using data from the relevant league or governing body"; player props use third-party box-score data, and in-app score displays do not decide anything. Novig says a result can take up to an hour to reach the portfolio once the event is official. Some "over" props can settle before the game ends, because the outcome is already decided. Multi-game and futures markets settle when the whole outcome is known.

Disrupted markets have a named procedure, Fair Value Settlement. Where a contract would otherwise be void — a player scratched before a prop resolves, a contest abandoned or never started, a result that cannot be confirmed from an approved source — it is not cancelled. It settles at a fair-value price Novig calculates from the 30 minutes of trading before the disrupting news, not at $1 or $0 and not at the price you paid, and the help centre says that determination is final. That is the clause to read before holding a player prop into team news.

Settlement cannot be reversed after the fact, according to the settlement article. Before settlement, rule 7.1 of the rulebook lets Ludlow refer a contested outcome to its own Outcome Review Committee, at its sole discretion; the committee decides within 24 hours and its determination is final. A member who disagrees can write to Novig support, but the rulebook gives them no right to start that review, and because Novig is the exchange, there is no other venue inside the platform to take it to.

Mechanically, the rulebook matches orders by price-time priority and all positions are fully cash-collateralised. One mechanic the API documentation spells out: every transition from pre-game to live voids every resting order on that market, and a live window can open more than once. A limit order left overnight on a game does not survive kick-off.

Integrations

There is a real trading API. Orders go in as signed REST requests (Ed25519 or P-256), and one WebSocket carries book changes, the trade tape, market status changes and your own fills. A management key, created from your profile in the web app, opens up to five subaccounts with a trading key each; there is a QA environment for testing and a published OpenAPI 3.1 document. Novig does not publish a Python or TypeScript client; you sign requests yourself against its test vectors.

Liquidity providers are onboarded separately by email, with a minimum deposit of $30,000 on the API account and an opt-in request-for-quote channel for pricing combinations.

Novig also publishes free exchange data: two anonymised CSV files per trading day — every executed trade, and a snapshot of every market with volume, open interest and OHLC prices — starting from 3 August 2026, around 5 a.m. Eastern the next morning.

The member agreement commits to delivering IRS Form 1099 and other tax documents electronically, through the member portal or by email, by 31 January each year.

Limitations

• Sports only. Anyone who wants an election, a rate decision or a box-office contract is on the wrong card.
• Three states are out, and the age floor is 21. Nevada, Arizona and Michigan are blocked by device location, and in-state travel freezes deposits, withdrawals and new orders.
• A young exchange. Designated in June 2026 and live since August, after a sweepstakes history. Its rulebook is version 1.3, and its own pages already disagree on the sports list — the help centre's sports article omits soccer, which the overview names.
• The fee depends on the clock. The same contract is free to take before the game and costs 0.75¢ at 50¢ once it starts, and futures cost double. Two of Novig's own pages draw the futures line differently.
• Resting orders die at kick-off. Every move to live voids the book on that market.
• Fair Value Settlement means a disrupted market pays neither $1 nor $0 and does not refund your entry price either.
• Promotional balances are trade credits, not cash. They expire, must be used whole on one trade and carry a price limit — Novig's example admits only contracts priced at 66.7¢ or less; the points programme has no cash value.
• Free editorial "picks" sit next to the markets. Novig's blog publishes game previews under headlines such as "Braves vs. Brewers Prediction, Picks & Prices for Saturday's MLB Game" that favour a side and quote Novig prices. They are free and separate from the order ticket, and nothing places an order for you.
• Nobody here has funded an account. Everything above is read from Novig's help centre, API documentation, member agreement and rulebook, and from the CFTC's register and Ludlow's designation order, on 3 October 2026, and re-checked on 4 October.

Alternatives

Kalshi lists sports contracts beside every other category, accepts 18-year-olds and has the deeper API ecosystem; its standard taker fee is 1.75¢ at 50¢. Polymarket US is the other directly accessed US exchange. Crypto.com lists sports singles on its own designated contract market at Kalshi's rate. The brokers — Robinhood among them — put a second commission on top of someone else's exchange, which is the layer Novig does not have.