Should Politicians Be Able to Use Prediction Markets? House Bill Proposes Ban

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and 30 of his Home of Representatives colleagues, together with Former Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), are making a push to ban authorities officers from accessing prediction markets.

The lawmakers launched new laws, the Public Integrity in Monetary Prediction Markets Act of 2026, on Friday morning.

The invoice would cease lawmakers and their workers from taking part in prediction markets. Within the context of the invoice, that would come with all federal elected officers, political appointees, and staff of the Home of Representatives, Senate, and different govt companies.

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The invoice argues that D.C. insiders needs to be blocked from taking part in markets after they possess “materials private info” a few market or the power to affect its consequence.

The time period is borrowed from securities regulation and is used to cease individuals with insider details about an organization from buying and selling securities. Prediction markets and the businesses that provide them, like Kalshi and Polymarket, have thus far been solely regulated by the Commodities and Futures Buying and selling Fee.

Earlier this week, Polymarket confronted scrutiny after a dealer received greater than $400,000 on a guess that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro can be faraway from workplace earlier than the top of the month. Criticism centered on the timing of the guess, which appeared simply hours earlier than U.S. particular forces apprehended Maduro.

“Essentially the most corrupt nook of Washington, D.C. could be the intersection of prediction markets and the federal authorities—the place insider buying and selling and self-dealing are now not imagined dangers however demonstrated risks,” stated Rep. Torres, in an announcement. “We ignore this plain-sight corruption at our personal peril.”

Torres, Pelosi, and their Home colleagues aren’t the one ones crying foul over what seems to be unfair predictions positioned by individuals with insider data in D.C..

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) included a clip of a current White Home press convention in his personal criticism of permitting elected officers entry to guess on markets that they will immediately affect.

The clip reveals the final 30 seconds of a White Home press convention, and a timer displaying that the occasion concluded proper earlier than it had lasted 1 hour and 5 minutes—which created an enormous windfall for predictors who guess in opposition to the press convention lasting 65 minutes.

“Who cares concerning the size of a press convention? What fool is betting on that?” he wrote on X. “However we should always undoubtedly care that there are markets that give incentives to individuals with energy to alter outcomes in order that they or individuals they know can get wealthy on an enormous guess. It is insane we enable this.”

Loxley Fernandes, the CEO and co-founder of Dastan—which owns prediction protocol Myriad and in addition an editorially impartial Decrypt—argued that participation from insiders is extra of a characteristic than a bug.

“Academically talking, prediction markets are one of the vital efficient instruments for rooting out inside info and maximizing the effectivity and velocity of knowledge transmission,” he stated earlier this week.

Whereas he does think about insider buying and selling to be an issue, he does take situation with the comparability between prediction markets and conventional playing. “To this point, we now have checked out trendy prediction markets as different casinos—and I consider this framing is inaccurate,” he added.