Since then, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has spent the year publicly carrying water for prediction markets, in court and out.
We spoke about the Chairman's upbringing, his time at the SEC and now the CFTC, crypto and prediction markets.
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“Power concentrated within the CFTC sets a fragile precedent,” Dominick John, analyst at Zeus Research, told Decrypt, warning that one commissioner’s conviction could push legitimacy for on-chain prediction markets “without broad consensus.”
Such a centralization could “sharpen uncertainty” and increase the likelihood of reversals which could then weaken policy, he added.
If Polymarket’s main exchange does reopen to U.S. users, retail traders stand to gain easier access and deeper liquidity, though the trade-off is “tighter regulated oversight that pulls prediction markets closer to TradFi,” John added.
“A USDC-collateralised exchange settling on Polygon could become the first crypto-native venue operating inside the U.S. federal derivatives perimeter,” Julian Tuerling, product and research lead at market intelligence firm xⁿ Research, told Decrypt.
If it pushes through, this could mean the resolution of a years-long argument over whether on-chain infrastructure can sit inside traditional regulatory frameworks, he added.
A user base skewed toward crypto natives would start absorbing a cohort that expects “the experience of a Robinhood or a Draftkings,” Tuerling said, with Polymarket forced to decide how much of its on-chain texture to preserve and how much to abstract away.
“Lifting the 2022 ban is not housekeeping,” Yuriy Brisov, partner at Digital & Analogue Partners, told Decrypt, warning that a “future Commission, with the missing seats restored, can reopen anything Selig signs alone.”
If done soon, the decision would land amid an open jurisdictional fight, and an approval would mean “the agency picking the winner before the courts have ruled,” Brisov said.
Decrypt has approached Polymarket and the CFTC for comment and will update this article should they respond.
