Van Dyke fights CFTC bid to weigh in on Polymarket case

In Manhattan federal court on Monday, Gannon Ken Van Dyke’s lawyers opposed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s request to file an amicus brief in his criminal case. The regulator had sought leave on Aug. 21 to weigh in on Van Dyke’s bid to dismiss Commodity Exchange Act charges, including whether event contracts on platforms such as Polymarket fall under the law as swaps.

Defense lawyers argued that the CFTC is not a neutral friend of the court. They said the agency is trying to advance its own regulatory position while its separate civil case against Van Dyke remains stayed pending the criminal proceeding. In one filing, they called the commission a “regulatory wolf” rather than a “friend of the Court.”

The CFTC, for its part, said it wanted to address arguments raised by the defense and that its proposed brief would be timely and useful. The agency has also argued that Congress defined swaps broadly enough to include the sort of event contracts Van Dyke traded, and that his reading of the statute would risk narrowing federal oversight of a wide range of prediction markets.

The dispute sits atop a case that the CFTC and the Justice Department brought in April. According to the CFTC complaint, Van Dyke, then an enlisted member of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, was involved in Operation Absolute Resolve, the U.S. effort to capture Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, and used sensitive nonpublic information from that work to trade on Polymarket.

The commission says that between Dec. 30, 2025, and Jan. 2, 2026, he bought more than 436,000 Yes shares in a Maduro-related contract and made more than $404,000. The Justice Department gave a slightly different accounting, saying he bet roughly $33,000 across about 13 wagers and profited about $410,000.

The Justice Department said Van Dyke created a Polymarket account around Dec. 26, traded on Maduro- and Venezuela-related markets, and later asked Polymarket to delete the account. After President Trump’s Truth Social post on Jan. 3 announcing Maduro’s capture, the price of one January contract jumped from $0.375 to $0.955 in four minutes and stayed above $0.95 until it resolved that morning.

The CFTC complaint describes Polymarket as a decentralized-finance protocol on the Polygon blockchain and says it uses UMA Oracle to resolve its contracts. It also says event contracts are derivatives that settle on whether a future event occurs, often with a binary payoff. The broader case has become part of the argument over how prediction markets should handle trading based on nonpublic information, and a criminal trial could begin in late 2026 or early 2027.