CFTC Sends Two Rules on Event Contracts to White House for Review

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has submitted two proposed rules to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs that would redefine “swap” to include event contracts, the instruments underpinning platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. Both filings are now under OIRA review, according to the public docket. Three outlets, Cointelegraph, The Block and CoinDesk, published headlines on the filing around the same date, but only Cointelegraph’s report carried the substantive detail used here.

What the docket actually shows

The first filing is a proposed rule expanding the swap definition to cover event contracts. The second is an interim final rule carving out casino-style gambling products from that same category. Neither rule has been finalized. Both sit at OIRA, the White House office that reviews significant federal regulations before they can be published, which is a procedural step, not an approval.

The two-rule structure is deliberate. By classifying event contracts as swaps while separately excluding gambling products, the CFTC is trying to draw a legal line that keeps prediction markets inside its own regulatory perimeter and casino betting outside it.

Why the swap label matters

Federal law gives the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over swaps traded on its registered exchanges. If event contracts formally qualify as swaps, that claim gets considerably harder for state regulators to challenge in court. The agency has already used this argument against state gambling regulators that want to apply their own licensing and consumer-protection rules to sports-related event contracts offered on Polymarket and Kalshi.

States have pushed back specifically on sports contracts, arguing they function like wagers and should fall under state gambling law rather than federal commodities oversight. Cointelegraph noted that Kalshi recently lost an appeal in this dispute, a development that could put the underlying jurisdictional question in front of the Supreme Court.

What’s confirmed and what isn’t

The underlying event, that the CFTC sent two rules on event contracts to OIRA, is corroborated at the headline level by three independent outlets. The granular detail, including the exact wording of the swap definition and the gambling carve-out, comes from a single accessible source. Readers building compliance workflows or tracking regulatory dockets around prediction markets should treat the headline fact as solid and the specific rule language as pending independent confirmation once the docket text becomes publicly searchable.

No timeline for finalizing either rule has been disclosed. The docket remains open at OIRA as of the October 1 filing date.

Sources

• cointelegraph.com
• theblock.co
• coindesk.com