Tag: Business – Decrypt

Google is done treating quantum computing as a future problem. On Tuesday, the company published a formal timeline for transitioning its entire infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) by 2029—calling the move urgent and saying quantum frontiers “may be closer than they appear.”

“As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it’s our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline,” the blog reads. “Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signature.”

The announcement, signed by Google VP of Security Engineering Heather Adkins and Senior Cryptography Engineer Sophie Schmieg, describes the 2029 target as a response to rapid advances in quantum hardware, error correction, and factoring resource estimates.

In plain English: The machines that could theoretically crack today’s encryption are getting real, faster than expected.

Google’s warning rests on two distinct threats. The first is already happening. So-called “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks allow bad actors to steal encrypted data today and sit on it, confident they’ll be able to unlock it once quantum computers are powerful enough. That threat is present-tense. The second is future-facing: digital signatures, the cryptographic foundation of authentication across the internet, will need to be replaced before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer—a CRQC—arrives.

To lead by example, Google announced that Android 17 will integrate post-quantum digital signature protection using ML-DSA, an algorithm recently standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The company is also pushing PQC across Google Cloud and internal communications systems.

The 2029 deadline is not arbitrary. IBM has its own roadmap targeting fault-tolerant quantum systems by the same year. As both companies race toward that threshold, 2025 marked a turning point in the field—when error correction breakthroughs, new processor architectures, and a Caltech result trapping over 6,000 atomic qubits at once shifted the conversation from “if” to “when.”

What does it mean for Bitcoin?

Bitcoin runs on elliptic curve cryptography (or ECDSA signatures), the same class of math that quantum computers—running what’s known as Shor’s algorithm—could eventually reverse-engineer. That means: Given your public key, a sufficiently powerful quantum machine could derive your private key.

Normal computers would take centuries to crack something like this. Quantum computers may take that problem and turn it into something solvable in practical time.

The exposure is larger than most people realize. According to Project Eleven, a cybersecurity and crypto-focused startup working on protecting crypto from future quantum computer attacks, over 6.8 million Bitcoin—over $470 billion worth—sits in addresses that are vulnerable to quantum attacks, including coins from Bitcoin’s earliest days. A separate estimate from Ark Invest and Unchained puts roughly 35% of the total Bitcoin supply in address types theoretically vulnerable to a future quantum attack.

Google’s researchers recently found that cracking RSA encryption may require 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously estimated—a finding that compressed the security timeline for everything that relies on similar mathematical structures, Bitcoin included. Earlier estimates put the qubit count needed to crack Bitcoin at around 20 million. Researchers at Iceberg Quantum now suggest the number could fall to roughly 100,000.

Quantum computers have achieved almost a 10x growth in power in the last five years.

So, should we all panic and sell our coins? Not really—but we should pay attention.

First of all, Google isn’t saying quantum computers will break cryptography by 2029. It’s simply saying it plans to be ready before they do.

Also, Bitcoin developers are not asleep at the wheel. BIP 360, a proposal introducing a quantum-resistant address format called Pay-to-Merkle-Root, was recently merged into Bitcoin’s formal improvement repository. It doesn’t activate anything—but it starts the clock on a serious overhaul.

Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Bitcoin custody firm Casa, believes that even if quantum computers remain years away from posing a real threat, upgrading Bitcoin’s protocol and migrating billions in user funds could take five to 10 years on its own.

“Right now, we’re several orders of magnitude away from having a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, at least as far as we know,” Loop told Decrypt earlier this year. “If innovation in quantum computing continues at a similar, fairly linear rate, it’s going to take many years—probably over a decade, maybe even several decades—before we get to that point.”

Bitcoin’s decentralized governance means no single team can flip a switch. Miners, wallet developers, exchanges, and millions of individual users would all need to move simultaneously.

Google can set a 2029 deadline because it controls its own infrastructure. Bitcoin cannot. And that asymmetry is exactly what makes Google’s announcement matter for crypto—not as a death sentence, but as a hard deadline the network didn’t set for itself and can’t afford to ignore.

Google Research published TurboQuant on Wednesday, a compression algorithm that shrinks a major inference-memory bottleneck by at least 6x while maintaining zero loss in accuracy.

The paper is slated for presentation at ICLR 2026, and the reaction online was immediate.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince called it Google’s DeepSeek moment. Memory stock prices, including Micron, Western Digital, and Seagate, fell on the same day.

So is it real?

Quantization efficiency is a big achievement by itself. But “zero accuracy loss” needs context.

TurboQuant targets the KV cache—the chunk of GPU memory that stores everything a language model needs to remember during a conversation.

As context windows grow toward millions of tokens, those caches balloon into hundreds of gigabytes per session. That’s the actual bottleneck. Not compute power but raw memory.

Traditional compression methods try to shrink those caches by rounding numbers down—from 32-bit floats to 16, to 8 to 4-bit integers, for example. To better understand it, think of shrinking an image from 4K, to full HD, to 720p and so. It’s easy to tell it’s the same image overall, but there’s more detail in 4K resolution.

The catch: they have to store extra “quantization constants” alongside the compressed data to keep the model from going stupid. Those constants add 1 to 2 bits per value, partially eroding the gains.

TurboQuant claims it eliminates that overhead entirely.

It does this via two sub-algorithms. PolarQuant separates magnitude from direction in vectors, and QJL (Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss) takes the tiny residual error left over and reduces it to a single sign bit, positive or negative, with zero stored constants.

The result, Google says, is a mathematically unbiased estimator for the attention calculations that drive transformer models.

In benchmarks using Gemma and Mistral, TurboQuant matched full-precision performance under 4x compression, including perfect retrieval accuracy on needle-in-haystack tasks up to 104,000 tokens.

For context on why those benchmarks matter, expanding a model’s usable context without quality loss has been one of the hardest problems in LLM deployment.

Now, the fine print.

“Zero accuracy loss” applies to KV cache compression during inference—not to the model’s weights. Compressing weights is a completely different, harder problem. TurboQuant doesn’t touch those.

What it compresses is the temporary memory storing mid-session attention computations, which is more forgiving because that data can theoretically be reconstructed.

There’s also the gap between a clean benchmark and a production system serving billions of requests. TurboQuant was tested on open-source models—Gemma, Mistral, Llama—not Google’s own Gemini stack at scale.

Unlike DeepSeek’s efficiency gains, which required deep architectural decisions baked in from the start, TurboQuant requires no retraining or fine-tuning and claims negligible runtime overhead. In theory, it drops straight into existing inference pipelines.

That’s the part that spooked the memory hardware sector—because if it works in production, every major AI lab runs leaner on the same GPUs they already own.

The paper goes to ICLR 2026. Until it ships in production, the “zero loss” headline stays in the lab.

Visa announced Wednesday that it will join Canton Network as the first major global payments company to serve as a Super Validator, helping extend privacy-preserving blockchain infrastructure to banks and financial institutions worldwide.

The payments giant will be one of 40 Super Validators on the layer-1 Canton network, applying “the same trusted and reliable standards it uses to operate critical payment systems today,” it said in an announcement.

As a Super Validator with voting powers to shape Canton’s network decisions, Visa will help institutions experiment with and scale stablecoin payments, settlement, and treasury use cases without changing how they manage risk, compliance, and operations.

“Many banks see the lack of privacy as a dealbreaker for moving meaningful activity on-chain,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth products and strategic partnerships, in a statement. “By operating as a Super Validator on Canton Network, we’re bringing Visa-grade trust, governance and operational rigor that define Visa’s global network to privacy‑preserving blockchain infrastructure, so regulated financial institutions can bring payments on-chain without having to rethink how they operate.”

Canton’s configurable privacy model allows institutions to adopt blockchain without compromising confidentiality—addressing concerns that banks can’t run payroll if salaries are public and trading firms can’t reveal positions without hurting price discovery.

The move builds on Visa’s expanding digital asset work, including stablecoin settlement that has reached an annualized run rate of $4.6 billion globally and stablecoin-linked card programs spanning more than 130 programs across more than 50 countries.

Canton has seen significant uptake from major financial players, with Franklin Templeton expanding its tokenized fund platform Benji to the network and JPMorgan bringing over its JPM Coin for institutional client payments. In December, the Depository Trust & Clearing Company—which processes quadrillions of dollars’ worth of transactions annually—said it would issue tokenized securities on Canton.

Since launching in November, Canton’s native CC token has rapidly become one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies on the market. It’s up more than 3% over the last day to a recent price of $0.145 and a market cap above $5.5 billion, making it the 21st biggest coin by that metric per data from CoinGecko.

Global asset manager Franklin Templeton and real-world asset tokenization firm Ondo Finance are teaming up to offer tokenized versions of five Franklin Templeton exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as part of a new initiative, the firms announced on Wednesday. 

The funds—which include Franklin Templeton’s high-yield corporate ETF, its focused growth ETF, and its responsibly sourced gold ETF—will allow those without traditional brokerage accounts to gain access and trade them around the clock. 

“This initial set of ETFs was selected by Ondo, based on demand they’ve recognized in their ecosystem,” Franklin Templeton Head of Innovation Sandy Kaul told Decrypt. “We believe it’s important to anchor this space in high-quality, well-understood investment strategies, and Franklin Templeton will continue to take a thoughtful approach to bringing institutional-grade products on-chain.”

“We’ll evaluate future opportunities based on investor appetite, usability, and where we can deliver the most value,” she added. 

The firms will also work together on educational programs designed to showcase how traditional investments will fit in alongside “emerging financial ecosystems.” 

“Success is less about a single metric and more about expanding access while maintaining the standards and outcomes investors expect from Franklin Templeton,” Kaul added. “We’re focused on how these products are actually used: helping investors access diversified strategies, engage more consistently with long-term investing, and integrate traditional investments into their financial lives on-chain.”

The new tokenized ETF offerings will use Ondo’s tokenized securities platform, Ondo Global Markets, which has established more than $620 million in total value locked (TVL) since its launch last fall. 

However, access to the products is not intended for U.S. users, who are ineligible to make trades on Ondo’s Global Markets platform.

Ondo rolled out access to more than 100 tokenized U.S. equities on the Ethereum blockchain in September as interest around tokenized equities and products rose. 

Franklin Templeton also has a long history with tokenized assets, debuting its Franklin On-Chain U.S. Government Money Fund on the Stellar network in 2021 before expanding the offering to Ethereum in 2024. It has also since expanded to Polygon, Aptos, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Solana, and Base.

The pair’s latest tokenization initiative comes a day after the New York Stock Exchange announced it will collaborate with the BlackRock-backed Securitize for the tokenization of securities. Also, last week, Nasdaq earned SEC approval to test tokenized versions of some securities in a pilot program.

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to add in comments from Franklin Templeton, replacing quotes from the press release.

Cipher Digital, a publicly traded developer and operator of industrial-scale data centers for high-performance computing workloads, announced Wednesday that it has signed a 15-year lease for its third data center campus, furthering its recent pivot from Bitcoin miner to powering the growing demand for AI power and other computing needs.

The company will develop and deliver a new HPC data center at one of its existing sites under the agreement, according to a press release. Investors appear to like the news, with Cipher’s stock (CIFR) rising more than 8% since the opening bell Wednesday to recently trade at $16.14 per share.

“This agreement for our third large AI campus reinforces Cipher’s position as a trusted partner to develop high-quality HPC data center infrastructure for the world’s leading companies,” said Cipher CEO Tyler Page, in a statement.

Cipher also announced the closing of a revolving credit facility providing up to $200 million of committed capacity, with an additional accordion option of up to $50 million. The facility, which was undrawn at close, has a scheduled maturity of March 2030 and bears interest at the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) plus 1.25% to 1.75%, with step-down pricing based on the company’s total debt to market capitalization ratio.

“This transaction marks Cipher’s first syndicated revolving credit facility and represents a major step in the evolution of our capital structure,” said Cipher CFO Greg Mumford, in a statement. “We believe this facility highlights the continued strength and maturation of our business, as well as the growing confidence in our long-term strategy from premier financial institutions.”

Morgan Stanley serves as administrative agent, lead arranger, and lead bookrunner, with Banco Santander, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Wells Fargo also joining in the syndicate.

The company rebranded from Cipher Mining in February, saying that it was expanding beyond its original Bitcoin mining focus to serve broader high-performance computing demand. Cipher Digital also sold off an interest in three joint mining sites in February, along with mining rigs housed at one of its sites.

“While Bitcoin mining played a foundational role in building Cipher’s power origination expertise and large-scale development capabilities, the company’s identity has evolved to focus on enabling next-generation compute at industrial scale,” it said last month, adding that it would “maintain optimized exposure to the Bitcoin mining industry in a capital-light manner.”

Cipher is one of several Bitcoin mining firms that have made either full or partial moves away from their original core business towards powering AI and other high-performance computing needs, including Core Scientific, Cango, and Bitfarms (now Keel Infrastructure).

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced an immediate moratorium on cryptocurrency donations to UK political parties following an independent review into countering foreign financial influence in British politics, according to the Press Association.

The ban, triggered by the government-commissioned Rycroft review, covers donations of any size, and will be applied retrospectively to all cryptocurrency donations received from today. Parties will have 30 days to return any crypto received once legislation is passed, after which criminal penalties apply. The review also recommended that overseas donations from UK citizens living abroad and still on the electoral register be capped at £100,000 per year.

The rules are being written into the Representation of the People Bill currently going through Parliament.

To date, the only major political party in the country to accept donations in crypto is Reform UK. Reports indicate that the party received the UK’s first-ever crypto donation in October 2025, though no declaration has been made to the Electoral Commission.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has positioned himself as a “champion” for cryptocurrency, calling for lower capital gains taxes on crypto and for the establishment of a national Bitcoin reserve.

Members of Reform UK reportedly walked out of Parliament during the announcement of the ban, during which Starmer aimed a pointed barb at Farage, suggesting that there is “only one party leader who has shown he will say anything, no matter how divisive, if he is paid to do so.”

Philip Rycroft, the former senior civil servant who authored the review, stopped short of calling for a permanent ban on crypto donations. In the review, he wrote that a moratorium “should not be seen as a prelude to an outright and permanent ban,” but as an “interlude” to allow the regulatory environment to catch up with cryptoassets, and gather together the expertise to allow for the “safe use of cryptoassets in the political process.”

NASA is shifting the focus of its Artemis Moon program toward building a permanent base on the lunar surface.

The agency said on Tuesday the change reflects a broader strategy to establish a sustained human presence on the Moon as a “foundation for an enduring lunar base and the next step toward Mars.”

During a presentation at the NASA “Ignition” event in Washington, D.C., NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the space agency is placing greater emphasis on surface operations to support technology testing, scientific research, and preparation for Mars missions.

“Shifting NASA workforce priority to the surface has advantages for safety, technology demonstration, and science,” Isaacman said. “The surface is really the proving ground for future Mars initiatives.”

Under the revised plan, NASA will pause development of the orbiting Gateway station and redirect funding and engineering resources toward lunar surface infrastructure. However, Isaacman said the move “does not preclude revisiting the orbital outpost in the future.”

Three phases

In phase one, the agency will shift from infrequent lunar missions to a repeatable approach using the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and the Lunar Terrain Vehicle initiative. Robotic landings will deliver rovers, instruments, and technology demonstrations to test mobility, power systems, communications, navigation, and other surface operations.

“We will dramatically expand lunar landings through the CLPS and LTV programs, delivering rovers, instruments, and technology payloads,” Isaacman said. Phase one, he added, is about “moving from infrequent, bespoke efforts to a templated approach that will generate significant learning through experimentation.”

In phase two, NASA plans to deploy semi-habitable infrastructure and routine logistics to support regular astronaut operations on the Moon.

Canada, Italy, and Japan will contribute to building the lunar base, including the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s pressurized rover, Italy’s multi-purpose habitation module, and Canada’s Lunar Utility Vehicle.

In phase three, NASA will deliver heavier infrastructure needed to sustain a long-term human presence on the Moon as cargo-capable landing systems come online, the agency said.

“The moon base will not appear overnight,” Isaacman said. “We will invest approximately $20 billion over the next seven years and build it through dozens of missions, working together with commercial and international partners toward a deliberate and achievable plan.”

Beyond its Moon operation, NASA said it plans to launch Space Reactor-1 Freedom, a nuclear-powered spacecraft, to Mars by 2028. The mission aims to test nuclear electric propulsion, which officials say is needed to transport heavy cargo to deep-space destinations where solar power is limited.

NASA’s announcement comes as a new space race ramps up, with companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX pursuing their own missions to the Moon and Mars.

Last year, Musk said the company planned to launch its massive Starship rocket to Mars by the end of 2026, carrying Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots.

The shift also alters NASA’s upcoming flight plans. Artemis III, originally scheduled for 2024, is now planned for 2027. Artemis IV, which would follow in 2028, is billed as “humanity’s return to the lunar surface” and would launch with a crewed lunar landing.

After Artemis V, NASA said it plans to transition to sending crews to the Moon twice a year.

“The goal is not just to reach the Moon, but to stay,” the White House wrote on X, adding that America “will never give up the Moon again.”

NASA did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s Request for comment.

Stablecoin issuer Circle saw its stock take a 20% dive Tuesday following a double shot of potentially concerning news for the firm behind the prominent USDC stablecoin.

As of the close of trading, CRCL changed hands for $101.24, falling just over 20% on the day—and it’s ticking down further in after-hours trading thus far, as of this writing. Shares of the closely aligned crypto exchange Coinbase also fell nearly 10% on the day, finishing at $181.04.

Early Tuesday, stablecoin rival Tether—issuer of the largest stablecoin by market cap, USDT—said that it had agreed to undergo a full audit by an unnamed “Big Four” accounting firm, one of the last potential hurdles to compliance with the U.S. GENIUS Act. That could make Tether a bigger domestic threat to Circle in the future.

Circle’s share price may also have been impacted by the latest developments with another piece of legislation, the proposed Clarity Act market structure bill that’s still being revised by lawmakers. Crypto lobbyists reviewed compromise language regarding stablecoin yield on Monday, with the banking lobby currently reviewing to see if they’ll get onboard with the version of the language put together by Senators Alsobrooks and Tillis and the White House.

Speculation over the reported Clarity Act draft has echoed across social media as crypto industry players grapple with the potential impacts if restrictions on stablecoin yield make it into the final version of the bill—and it’s ultimately passed.

At the time of writing, Coinbase has been offering 3.5% rewards for USDC balances held on its premium Coinbase One platform. The company just ended its USDC rewards program for free exchange users in December. At the time, it had been advertising 4.5% rewards for Coinbase One users, but has since adjusted its rewards rate.

Coinbase competitor Kraken has been offering up to 5% rewards on USDC balances held on its platform. And Binance, the largest centralized crypto exchange by volume, pays users 5.63% on USDC balances held in its wallets. Binance used to offer its own stablecoin, BUSD, but stopped minting new tokens after its issuing partner Paxos ran afoul of New York regulators, who alleged the firm hadn’t done enough due diligence.

Analysts have otherwise been optimistic about Circle. The company’s shares have gained 170% since early February, far outpacing other crypto stocks and the struggling broader stock market.

Just last week, Clear Street analyst Owen Lau raised the firm’s price target for CRCL to $152 after noting that Mastercard’s $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK, a stablecoin payments infrastructure firm, was bullish for the space.

The CRCL surge had also been driven by a blowout earnings report. Circle announced 72% growth in its USDC stablecoin to $75.3 billion and 77% revenue growth to $770 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, triggering a 35% single-day gain that rippled across crypto markets.

A higher-for-longer interest-rate outlook, reinforced by geopolitical tensions and rising oil prices, had also boosted Circle’s earnings prospects, since the company earns substantial interest on reserves backing its USDC stablecoin.

At the time of writing, there’s more than $78 billion worth of USDC tokens in circulation, and an equivalent worth of cash or cash-like investments being held by its issuer to back those stablecoins.

OpenAI will shut down Sora, its AI video-generation platform that allowed users to create short videos from text prompts, as it pivots to “world simulation research to advance robotics,” the company told Decrypt on Tuesday.

The decision to end its standalone generative video product appears to also disrupt a planned entertainment partnership with Disney tied to the app.

“As we continue to focus on our roadmap to AGI and the compute needed to deliver agentic AI capabilities, we’re making the tough decision to discontinue supporting Sora as a consumer app and API offerings,” the company added.

No changes will be made to the AI Image Generator inside ChatGPT, OpenAI confirmed.

OpenAI said it will share more information soon, including timelines for shutting down the app and its API and details on how users can preserve their work.

The fallout from OpenAI’s announcement has been swift.

A proposed $1 billion investment from Disney connected to Sora is no longer moving forward after OpenAI announced it would shut down the app, according to a report by Deadline.

OpenAI first introduced Sora in February 2024 as a text‑to‑video model that could turn written prompts into short clips.

The company later expanded the technology with Sora 2, a more advanced model released alongside a standalone Sora mobile app.

“When we released Sora, our goal was to teach AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion,” the company said. “We will continue to prioritize longer-term world simulation research, especially as it pertains to robotics and helping people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

While OpenAI’s entry into video generation was highly anticipated, it became a consistent money drain for the company, reportedly costing about $15 million per day.

The Sora iOS app introduced a social-style video feed where users could generate and share AI-created clips.

It also included “cameos,” a feature that allowed users to insert themselves into AI-generated scenes after recording a short video to capture their likeness and voice.

Sora quickly drew scrutiny as it became widely available.

Legal experts warned the system could recreate recognizable characters and copyrighted franchises, raising intellectual property concerns.

Researchers also warned that Sora could be used to spread misinformation, noting that the system produced realistic-looking news footage depicting events that never happened, including of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wearing a cat suit.

Critics also argued that tools like Sora, designed to generate and distribute low-quality synthetic media, also known as AI slop, could flood the internet.

In December, OpenAI and Disney announced a three-year agreement that would have allowed the company to license roughly 250 Disney characters from franchises including Frozen, Star Wars, and Marvel for use in AI-generated videos.

“This agreement shows how AI companies and creative leaders can work together responsibly to promote innovation that benefits society, respect the importance of creativity, and help works reach vast new audiences,” Altman said in a statement at the time.

Disney said it respects OpenAI’s decision to exit the video-generation business and will continue exploring other ways to work with generative AI.

“We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators,” a Disney spokesperson reportedly said.

Editor’s note: Adds comments from OpenAI

The United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) wants to create clear rules within U.S. derivatives markets for those building with new technologies, and has unveiled a new task force to help do so. 

The newly established CFTC Innovation Task Force will work alongside the Commission to develop those frameworks specifically for builders in crypto and blockchain, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, and prediction markets. 

“By establishing a clear regulatory framework for innovators building on the new frontier of finance, we can foster responsible innovation at home and ensure American market participants are not left on the sidelines,” said CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, in a statement. 

The task force will be led by Selig’s senior advisor, Michael J. Passalacqua, and said it will coordinate with agencies like the SEC and the SEC’s Crypto Task Force on innovation initiatives. 

“Under Chairman Selig, the Innovation Task Force (ITF) will provide clarity to builders by advancing the CFTC’s innovation agenda across crypto, AI, and prediction markets,” Passalacqua posted on X. 

The regulator has been busy in March, particularly as it relates to its relationship with prediction markets and their rapid growth. Under Selig’s leadership, it recently published a letter that guided registered exchanges on compliance and product requirements for event contracts, those used on prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. 

The CFTC is also inviting public comment about whether or not it needs to amend or write new rules on prediction market oversight.

Those moves come amid intensifying scrutiny around prediction markets, highlighted by a push by Democratic lawmakers and concerns over insider trading and event contracts tied to things like terrorism and war. 

To that end, both Kalshi and Polymarket made public moves on Monday to address insider trading on their platforms. For Kalshi, that meant adding preemptive screening for politicians and individuals working in sports and ensuring they cannot trade on markets related to them. 

Similarly, Polymarket took steps to clarify its rules around insider trading as it enhanced its market integrity terms. 

The regulator has remained adamant that it is the governing body for prediction markets, with Chairman Selig recently saying to those that challenge the CFTC over jurisdiction—including states—that his agency would “see you in court.” 

The remark comes as states begin to challenge prediction markets over their offerings, like in Arizona, where the state filed charges against Kalshi for allegedly running an illegal gambling operation. Also last week, Nevada secured a temporary ban against Kalshi, blocking the startup from offering sports, politics, and entertainment event contracts in the state for at least 14 days.

Earlier this month, the CFTC signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Major League Baseball, which will see the parties work together to limit markets that may pose “integrity risk.” 

Beyond prediction markets, the CFTC made a major ruling last week that gives self-custodial wallet Phantom the ability to offer its users access to derivatives markets without registering as a broker.