On 22 July 2026, five days before comments closed on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's prediction markets proposal, two organisations sat down with Commission staff. One was the National Football League. The other was Xchange Alpha, which the CFTC had designated as a contract market on 2 February 2026, according to the Commission's own announcement of the designation order. Both meetings are in the public rulemaking file. Anyone can look up who attended, from which side, with first and last names. What neither organisation asked for is written down anywhere.
This is not a complaint about lobbying. Meeting the regulator while a rule is being written is ordinary, legitimate and often useful, and a young category arguing about a statute nobody reads the same way needs those conversations more than most. The question worth asking is narrower and it is the question this initiative keeps coming back to. When the record is finished and somebody reads it in three years, what will they be able to check?
Footnote 156 puts the room and the letter in the same list
The proposal itself says so. In the full text of the proposed rule published in the Federal Register on 12 June 2026 (RIN 3038-AF65), the Commission describes the record it built before proposing: roughly 3,500 comments on the March 2026 advance notice, of which about 300 were substantive, plus staff meetings with market participants. Footnote 156 then explains how the two are treated:
"Information about meetings that CFTC staff have had with outside organizations regarding prediction markets is included in the list of comments on the ANPRM at the link in the previous note. The views expressed in the comments in response to the ANPRM and at such meetings are collectively referred to as the views of 'commenters.'"
Read that twice, because it changes how the rest of the document should be read. Everywhere the proposal attributes a view to commenters, that view may have arrived in a signed letter that anyone can open, or it may have arrived in a room. The two are merged into one word and the document does not distinguish them. We wrote about the shape of that comment record in our piece on the forty questions and the two rules that came back, and this is the part of it that nobody has followed up.
The phrase ex parte appears nowhere in the proposal
The proposal runs to roughly 76,000 words. The phrase that governs exactly this situation, ex parte, is not in any of them. The rule that does govern it sits somewhere else entirely, on a plain explainer page the agency maintains under Law and Regulation. On its page describing how Commission rulemaking works, the CFTC commits to two things:
"It is the Commission's policy to make public on the Commission's website substantive ex parte communications, both written and oral, that provide significant, material information addressed to the merits of a proposed rule. It is also the Commission's practice to make public on its website all ex parte meetings held on proposed rules, including the names and affiliations of attendees."
Notice what the second sentence promises and what it does not. It promises the meeting and the attendees. It says nothing about the substance of what was said in the meeting. The first sentence reaches further, to written and oral communications that carry significant material information, but it leaves the judgement of what qualifies inside the agency. Every finding below is consistent with that policy being followed. That is the point. The thinness of the record is not a violation of anything. It is what the commitment actually says.
Three filings in this docket are not letters
The proposal directs comments to Regulations.gov, where the file is docket CFTC-2026-1189. A search of that docket for filings titled as meetings returns three, as of 27 September 2026:
- Meeting with Xchange Alpha, posted 22 July 2026
- Meeting with NFL, posted 23 July 2026
- Meeting of CFTC Tribal Roundtable, posted 15 September 2026
Each is filed as a public submission, the same object type as a comment letter from an individual. In a list of well over a thousand filings, nothing marks them apart except the word at the front of the title. A reader scrolling the docket for letters will scroll straight past the only three entries that record a conversation. We counted who is in that docket in our look at who actually filed, and even there the meeting entries read as two odd rows in an index of correspondence.
One memo runs to two pages, another to six words
The memoranda themselves are one page of Commission letterhead with five or six labelled fields. The NFL memorandum gives the date as 22 July 2026, names Cal Mitchell and Stephen Andrews for the CFTC and Brendon Plack and Andrew Dziedzic for the league, and summarises the substance in a single line: the participants discussed the proposal on the section 40.11 special rule, sports event contracts and public interest.
The Xchange Alpha memorandum has the same date and the same layout. Its CFTC attendees are Stephen Andrews and Mark Fajfar, its external attendee is Bella Rozenberg, and its summary reads in full: "Discussed event contracts and the NPRM." Six words. A designated contract market spoke to the agency writing the rule that will decide what it may list, five days before the comment window shut, and the public account of that conversation is a sentence that could describe any meeting held by anyone in the category this year.
Then compare the memorandum from the Tribal Roundtable of 14 September 2026, filed on the same template, in the same docket, by the same agency. Its summary is five lines and it opens with the specific thing the participants asked for, a pause on the section 40.11 rulemaking pending formal consultation with individual tribes and tribal leadership and with the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior and the National Indian Gaming Commission. It then lists the further topics, among them the effect on tribal sovereignty and gaming revenue and the interaction of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act with the Commodity Exchange Act. It separates the CFTC attendees who participated, Chairman Selig, Amir Zaidi and Emma Johnston, from eight who were present without participating. It names seventeen organisations and then tabulates each seat at the table with the person's title and the colleague they brought.
Same form, same file, same month. One record tells you what was asked for and one does not. The difference is not the system and it is not the policy. It is what the person filling in the form decided to write.
The register the agency built for meetings stopped in November 2020
The CFTC does keep a proper, browsable register of external meetings, and it is good. Each entry on the External Meetings pages links to a record with a title, a short description of what was discussed, the date, the rulemaking topic, the CFTC staff, the visitors and the organisations they represented. The most recent entry, a call with the Investment Company Institute, names two Commission staff and five visitors and describes the discussion as covering points the institute had raised in its comment letters on the bankruptcy proposals.
That entry is dated 30 November 2020. Counting the register out, it runs to 503 pages of ten rows with four on the last, which is roughly 5,020 published meetings, and the oldest of them is dated 17 June 2010. It was built for the Dodd-Frank implementation programme and its topic column still carries the roman numerals of that programme. Nothing has been added to it for more than five years, and a reader who goes looking for prediction market meetings in the place the agency built for meetings will find an empty decade.
The earlier half of the record sits in the system the agency left in April
There is a second reason the trail is hard to walk. The March 2026 advance notice, in its published text, told commenters to use the CFTC Comments Portal and said their submissions would be posted to the comment list on comments.cftc.gov. The June 2026 proposal points to Regulations.gov instead and does not mention the older portal at all in its addresses section. The agency's public comments page explains the cut: comment files opened on or after 28 April 2026 live on Regulations.gov, and files opened before that date remain in the former online system.
The advance notice file opened in March, so it fell on the older side of that line. Footnote 156 is pointing at it. Everything the Commission heard in a room before the proposal was written is in a comment list on a platform the agency has stopped opening new files on, reachable only by someone who has read a footnote in a document of 76,000 words and then knows to go to a second website. For the sake of being straight about our own method: our requests to that host on 27 September 2026 were refused by its security layer with an HTTP 403 while cftc.gov answered normally, so we did not read the list ourselves. Footnote 156 is our source for what is in it, not our own inspection.
Attendance is a weak proxy for influence
Put the two halves of the record side by side. A letter is a permanent, quotable, checkable artefact. When the NFL filed, every sentence it wrote became something a reader could weigh, which is why we could go through those letters line by line in our piece on what the league asked the Commission to mandate. A meeting by the same organisation in the same month produces a line saying the participants discussed sports event contracts and public interest.
That asymmetry has a direction, and it is the wrong one. The organisation that writes down what it wants is accountable for it forever. The organisation that only takes meetings is on the record as having been present and nothing more. Over a long rulemaking that is a real incentive, and it does not require anybody to behave badly for it to bite. It just means that the easiest way to be heard without being pinned down is the way that leaves the thinnest public trace.
For a category that spends most of its public argument insisting it is a market and not a book, that should be uncomfortable. The strongest thing prediction markets have to say for themselves is that a price is a public artefact anyone can inspect. A category that builds its case on visible information should not be relaxed about making its own advocacy the invisible kind.
What an exchange can publish that the memo will not
None of this needs a rule change, and it does not need the Commission to do anything differently. The tribal memorandum of 14 September proves the form already carries as much detail as the drafter puts in it. The gap can also be closed from the other side of the table, by the people who were in the room, and that side is the only one this initiative has any business addressing.
Directive 02 of our commitment says that fees, spreads, settlement sources, custody arrangements and conflicts of interest are stated in plain language on the surface where the trade happens. The principle underneath it is that the things which shape a user's position should be legible to the user. A rule that decides which contracts may exist shapes every position on the venue. The argument an exchange makes about that rule belongs in the same category of disclosure.
What that looks like in practice is not demanding. After a meeting with staff, publish a short note on your own site containing five things: the date, who attended from both sides, the rule or docket under discussion, the specific changes you asked for, and what you said about user protection. That is one paragraph. It costs nothing, it cannot be misquoted because you wrote it, it will usually be more complete than the agency's memorandum, and it converts a fact about access into a statement of position that anyone can hold you to later.
There is a harder version worth considering as well. If what you told staff in the room is something you would not put in a signed comment letter, that is information about the argument, not about the format. The test is not whether the meeting was proper. It is whether you would be content for the summary to run five lines rather than six words.
A record of who came is a record about access
As of 27 September 2026 the prediction markets rulemaking has a public record with two very different halves. One half is more than a thousand letters that anyone can read, argue with and quote. The other half is three lines of attendance, two of which say almost nothing, plus an unknown number of earlier conversations described only by a footnote pointing at a comment list on a retired portal. Both halves are, by the proposal's own wording, the views of commenters, and the final rule will be written from both.
The Commission has met its stated commitment on every one of those meetings. That is exactly why the gap is the category's problem to close rather than the agency's. Our manifesto puts it plainly: the market that survives regulation is the one that was already behaving as if regulation had arrived. An operator that publishes its own account of what it asked the regulator for, on the day it asked, is doing the cheapest possible version of that. If your venue is ready to make that a standing practice, the commitment is open to sign.