White House leaves prediction-market firms out of crypto meeting

Prediction-market executives were left out of the White House event with tech and crypto leaders on Wednesday, narrowing what had been billed as a broader industry meeting. According to the Washington Examiner, a White House official said the president would host the event to strengthen America’s innovative and technological dominance.

As reported on Aug. 14, the White House had been preparing a broader session with crypto and prediction-market executives.

A person familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that the administration decided to focus the gathering solely on crypto. The same reporting described the event as a kickoff for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Advisory Committee, whose inaugural meeting is taking place on Thursday.

The CFTC, the federal regulator of U.S. derivatives markets, has cast the committee as a forum for charting a course for a new frontier of finance. In its Aug. 13 agenda release, Chairman Michael Selig said America has long been the global hub of financial innovation and said he looked forward to meeting the committee’s entrepreneurs, thinkers and builders to discuss how emerging technologies and financial products are shaping markets.

The inaugural session is set to run from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern and will cover crypto assets, artificial intelligence and prediction markets. The commission said the meeting will be streamed live on CFTC.gov, and public comments may be submitted through Aug. 27.

Trump has said earlier this year that it is critically important that the CFTC’s exclusive authority over prediction markets be maintained, while several states have moved to regulate or ban the platforms on the grounds that they are illegal gambling businesses.

Those disputes have already produced litigation, including New York’s lawsuit against Kalshi. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig condemned that case and said the agency would continue to defend its jurisdiction.

Separate scrutiny is also growing on the products themselves. NPR reported that federal regulators opened an inquiry into so-called mention markets, where people bet on what a speaker may or may not say, and said Kalshi removed those markets from its sports offerings while the probe continues.