Discord as the Starting Point
We follow a content creator focused on League of Legends, with around 2,000 followers, who receives a private message on Discord. The sender offers him payment — in the region of €500 per one-month wave — in exchange for a few retweets each week. The instruction is explicit: "the arrangement must look spontaneous."
The posts to be shared concern the "probabilities" displayed by a prediction-market platform for League of Legends matches. The creator says he then reread his timeline with different eyes: messages published over the previous several weeks by professional players and coaches, influencers and journalists appear to stem from the same arrangement.
What a Prediction Market Is
Users buy and sell "shares" indexed to the outcome of an event. If the event occurs, the share is worth one dollar; if not, zero.
The vocabulary used by the platforms is borrowed from finance: users are "traders," odds are "prediction trends." The operation nonetheless consists of putting real money on the result of a match — what everyday language, and certain authorities, call a bet.
One example reveals the scale of the sums involved. In June 2026, during an LEC match, a single user lost roughly €238,000 on a single position: he had taken positions on every possible outcome of the match except the exact score that ultimately materialized — a far cry from the savvy "trader."
GRID Esports, Owner of the Official Data
Founded by the creator of sports-odds provider Don Best Sports, GRID captures in real time, directly from game servers, every event in a match: player statistics, game states, detailed actions. These feeds are resold to betting operators, media outlets and professional teams.
In late November 2023, Riot Games, publisher of League of Legends, made GRID its exclusive data provider for three years. Riot also took a stake in GRID, through a non-voting participation — meaning no influence over the company's decisions.
, GRID acquired its competitor Bayes Esports, then in liquidation. Since then, the company has held the majority of the rights to official data in global esports.
