Trump to Meet Crypto and Prediction Market Chiefs as CFTC Panel Convenes

The chief executives of Kalshi and Polymarket are expected at the White House complex on Wednesday alongside the chairs of the CFTC and the SEC, a day before a federal advisory committee sits down to discuss who actually gets to regulate event contracts. For the sportsbooks losing volume to those venues, that second meeting is the one that matters.

• President Donald Trump is expected to attend a meeting with crypto and prediction market executives at 2:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, according to reporting by The Block
• Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Michael Selig and Securities and Exchange Commission chair Paul Atkins are also expected, alongside Patrick Witt, executive director of the President's Council of Advisers for Digital Assets
• The gathering serves as a kickoff for the inaugural meeting of the CFTC's Innovation Advisory Committee, which sits the following day from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET
• The committee's agenda covers crypto asset regulation, artificial intelligence and prediction markets, with the prediction-markets session addressing the respective roles of federal and state authorities and recent state litigation
• Committee members include Polymarket's Shayne Coplan and Kalshi's Tarek Mansour, both of whose platforms are defendants in state enforcement actions

The Venues Under State Attack Are Being Received at the White House Complex

President Donald Trump is expected to attend a meeting at the White House complex on Wednesday afternoon that brings together senior executives from crypto companies and prediction-market venues, according to reporting by The Block and Bloomberg. The meeting is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. ET at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

The regulatory attendance is what distinguishes it from an ordinary industry reception. Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), is expected to attend, as is Paul Atkins, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Patrick Witt, executive director of the President's Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, is also expected.

The guest list spans the crypto and market-infrastructure industries: Coinbase, Ripple, Chainlink, Paradigm, a16z, The Digital Chamber, Bitget, Foresight Ventures and 1789 Capital, alongside the exchange and clearing establishment in Cboe, CME Group, Nasdaq and the DTCC. Ripple's chief executive Brad Garlinghouse is among those named. For this publication's readers, the two names that matter most are Shayne Coplan of Polymarket and Tarek Mansour of Kalshi.

The meeting functions as a kickoff for the first sitting of the CFTC's Innovation Advisory Committee, whose 35 members were named in February 2026. That committee convenes the following day, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET, across three agenda sessions: crypto asset regulation, artificial intelligence, and prediction markets.

The Agenda Item That Decides the Sportsbooks' Next Two Years

The prediction-markets session is scheduled to address the respective roles of federal and state authorities in overseeing prediction markets, and recent state litigation and enforcement actions. That is the central unresolved question in American sports betting, stated as a committee agenda item.

Kalshi's argument across its state litigation has been that its authorisation by the CFTC as a designated contract market pre-empts state-level gambling regulation. Courts have so far declined to accept that as sufficient basis for injunctive relief at the preliminary stage, and the exchange has absorbed a run of setbacks: as iGaming Times has reported, a Utah court declined to block enforcement, a federal judge denied a similar injunction in New York, and New York's governor and attorney general have sued the exchange outright, while Nevada has brought a first-of-its-kind action against Polymarket.

Against that, the federal posture has been markedly warmer. Trump posted on Truth Social in May 2026 on the CFTC's jurisdiction over prediction markets. Donald Trump Jr., the president's son, is a strategic adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket, having invested in Polymarket in August 2025. Separately, the Senate is scheduled to vote on a motion to proceed on the Clarity Act on 15 September 2026.

An advisory committee cannot make rules. It can, however, establish the frame in which a rulemaking is later written, and it is doing so with the two largest event-contract venues seated at the table.

Federal Pre-emption Is Being Argued in the Room Rather Than Only in Court

Kalshi has lost the pre-emption argument repeatedly in front of judges and is now making a version of it in front of the regulator that would have to assert the pre-emption. That is a rational shift. Courts have been unwilling to grant emergency relief on a contested reading of the Commodity Exchange Act, but a CFTC that chose to state expansively what falls inside its exclusive jurisdiction would change the terrain those cases are argued on. For state-licensed sportsbooks, the risk is no longer only that they lose handle to exchanges; it is that the federal regulator settles the boundary question in a way that leaves state gambling law with nothing to attach to. Nothing at this week's meetings does that. The direction of travel is nonetheless one way.

The Advisory Seat Is Worth More Than the Litigation Costs

There is an asymmetry worth naming. Kalshi and Polymarket are simultaneously defending enforcement actions from multiple states and sitting on a federal advisory committee shaping how their product class is understood in Washington. Sportsbooks, which hold state licences and pay state taxes precisely because they accepted state jurisdiction, have no equivalent federal forum, because their regulator is fifty regulators. Whatever the legal merits, the structural position favours the exchanges: they are litigating locally and lobbying centrally, and the central venue is the one that can pre-empt.

A Presidential Adviser on Both Sides of the Table Is a Governance Question

The presence of Donald Trump Jr. as a strategic adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket, with an investment in the latter, sits awkwardly beside a White House meeting at which the president and the CFTC chair discuss those companies' regulatory treatment. Nothing about that arrangement is unlawful, and it should not be treated as evidence of a decided outcome. It does mean that any subsequent CFTC assertion of exclusive jurisdiction over sports event contracts will be read by state regulators, and by the sportsbooks funding state tax bases, through that lens. Regulators who want their decisions to survive contact with litigation generally benefit from being able to show the reasoning was insulated from that kind of proximity.

The committee has no rulemaking power and this week produces no binding decision. It does put the federal-versus-state question on a formal agenda, with the exchanges in the room and the state licensees outside it.