Every event contract listed on a United States exchange arrives through one of two doors, and both are written into the same section of the Commodity Exchange Act. Under Commission Regulation 40.2 an exchange files a certification that the product complies with the law, the Commission must receive it by the open of business the day before listing, and trading starts next morning. Under Commission Regulation 40.3 the same exchange can instead hand the product over and ask to be told, on the record, that listing it would not break anything.
The second door is not a historical leftover. It is fully drafted, it was used four times in 2026, and nobody in the prediction market business has taken an event contract through it. That gap is the category's most interesting unused infrastructure.
Two doors in the same section of the statute
Both routes come from section 5c(c) of the Act, codified at 7 U.S.C. 7a-2(c). Paragraph (c)(1) is the self-certification election. Paragraph (c)(4)(A) is the other one: the entity may request that the Commission grant prior approval. Paragraph (c)(4)(C) then puts a deadline on the regulator rather than the filer, requiring final action within ninety days unless the submitting entity agrees to an extension.
Regulation 40.3 splits that statutory ninety days into two halves. The Commission gets forty five days from receipt and may extend by up to another forty five if the product raises novel or complex issues, if the submission is incomplete, or if the exchange does not answer questions in time. Anything the exchange adds to the filing on its own initiative restarts the clock, unless the Commission asked for it or it is a typographical fix.
The approval standard itself is narrow, because people routinely assume it is a discretionary blessing. Section 5c(c)(5)(B) says the Commission shall approve a new contract or other instrument unless the Commission finds that the new contract or other instrument would violate this chapter. Regulation 40.3(b) repeats it. An approval is a finding that nothing in the product breaks the law, not a stamp saying it is useful or socially desirable, and an exchange that treats it as marketing is misreading it.
One more asymmetry matters. Under 40.3(d)(1) a product is deemed approved at the end of the review period unless the Commission issues a notice of non-approval, so silence approves. Under 40.3(e)(2) that notice is presumptive evidence the entity may not truthfully certify the same or substantially the same product under 40.2 afterwards. Being told no closes the fast door too, which is the real reason the slower route feels risky to a product team.
One rule asks for concise, the other does not
Line up the two lists of required contents and the difference starts with a single adjective. Regulation 40.2(a)(3)(v) requires a concise explanation and analysis that is complete with respect to the product's terms, the underlying commodity and compliance with the Act. Regulation 40.3(a)(4) requires an explanation and analysis that is complete with the same scope and drops the word concise.
The document the exchange is told to keep short is the same one that later has to carry the weight of a review, a consequence we traced in our piece on what the right to respond under proposed Rule 40.11 is actually worth. The document nobody told to be short is the one almost nobody files.
Regulation 40.3 also asks for three things 40.2 never mentions. Paragraph (a)(5) requires the exchange to describe any agreements or contracts entered into with other parties that enable the registered entity to carry out its responsibilities. Paragraph (a)(8) requires a filing fee. Paragraph (a)(10) lets staff demand additional evidence with a deadline staff sets. Going the other way, 40.2(a)(3)(iv) requires the exchange's own certification of compliance, which 40.3 does not, because there the Commission makes the finding.
Appendix G is the document a certification never asks for
Paragraph (a)(5) sounds abstract until you read a real filing. On 21 July 2026 KalshiEX LLC submitted its GOLDPERP perpetual futures contract for approval, and the cover letter lists what went with it: terms and conditions, enhanced trading prohibitions, information about the source agency, an appendix on compliance with each Core Principle, a confidential appendix with more of the same, and a confidential Appendix G containing the exchange's agreement with the source agency.
That last item is the settlement source contract, filed with the regulator. As we argued in our piece on what settlement risk actually is, the agreement with whoever produces the number that decides the payout is what determines whether a market resolves cleanly or turns into an argument. Under self-certification, no rule asks the exchange to describe it at all.
Now the other side. On 20 May 2026 QCX LLC, trading as Polymarket US, self-certified its Combinatoric Athletic Outcome Contract. The entire public filing runs to three pages: a cover letter and two pages of terms and conditions. The compliance analysis is stated to be segregated into attachment B, for which the exchange sought confidential treatment under Commission Regulation 145.9. The product is the parlay-style contract we examined in our piece on combination markets, and the public record of why it complies with the law is a sentence saying the analysis exists somewhere else.
Both filings are lawful and neither exchange did anything it was not entitled to do. But one produced a public document a regulator, a journalist or a competitor can read and test, and the other produced a receipt.
Filtering the Commission's own database for approved event contracts returns 1995
The Designated Contract Market Products database published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission lets anyone filter by product category and status. Filtering on category Event and status Approved, as of 18 September 2026, returns eighteen records. All eighteen are Chicago Board of Trade crop yield insurance futures and options, filed in two batches dated 23 February 1995 and 26 December 1995: corn yield insurance for Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Nebraska and Ohio, soybean yield for Illinois, winter wheat for Kansas and spring wheat for North Dakota.
Those records predate the present regime entirely. The source note on both rules dates their current text to the Commission's 2011 adopting release for Part 40. The 1995 filings are not evidence that anyone chose the slower path. They are the residue of an era when approval was the only path there was.
The same filter with status Certified returns 4,740 event contracts, 1,759 of them between 1 January 2026 and 18 September 2026. Restricting the Approved filter to 2001 or later returns nothing.
A caveat belongs here, because those category labels are the Commission's and not the exchange's, and event-style products do sit elsewhere. The Commission's own June 2026 proposal records that in March 2010 Media Derivatives, Inc. sought approval under Regulation 40.3 of opening weekend motion picture revenue futures and binary options on a named film, and that the Commission approved them that June, finding in its published statement that the contracts were based on commodities, were not readily susceptible to manipulation and served an economic hedging purpose. A fortnight later it approved a box office receipts future for the Cantor Futures Exchange, whose database record sits under Financial Instrument. So the honest claim is narrower than the headline number and just as awkward: in the category the Commission itself labels Event, the approval path has been idle since the year it stopped being compulsory.
The exchange that files the most event contracts used the slower door for something else
Across every category, the Approved filter returns 838 records for the whole history of the database, and none at all between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2025. The last one before the present run was a Chicago Mercantile Exchange dividend index future dated 22 July 2015.
Then, in 2026, four approvals in a row, all of them to KalshiEX LLC: BTCPERP on 29 May, and GOLDPERP, SILVERPERP and PLATINUMPERP on 3 September. The GOLDPERP submission went in on 21 July and was approved forty four days later, which is the forty five day review period used almost to its edge.
Four more of the same exchange's perpetuals, covering a stock index, copper, a currency pair and a ten year rate, sat at status Approval Pending on 18 September 2026, alongside two New York Mercantile Exchange data centre rental index futures and seven Chicago Mercantile Exchange contracts on an NHL team index recorded as filed on 11 August 2026.
Read that sequence slowly. The company that certifies event contracts by the thousand knows how the approval route works. It has staffed it, filed it, waited out the clock and done it four times in one year. It simply has not used it for the products that are the subject of a live rulemaking, conflicting court rulings and an argument about whether the category counts as gaming.
What an approval leaves on the public record
This is where the difference stops being procedural. The order approving the BTCPERP contract, published by the Commission, runs to nine pages. It sets out how a contract with no expiry can still converge on a spot price through a periodic funding mechanism, then explains what has to be true about the underlying market for that mechanism to work: continuous and broadly distributed spot trading, so the reference price is observable while the contract trades; depth, so a large position holder cannot cheaply move the reference at the moment a funding payment is calculated; and round the clock trading, so arbitrageurs can act on the convergence incentive before dislocations grow.
That is a listing standard, written by the regulator, in public, with reasons. And the order does not keep it to one firm. It states that it would not violate the Act for Kalshi and other DCMs to list the contract as a futures contract, and that the analysis extends to similarly structured perpetuals referencing digital commodities with deep, active and continuous spot markets.
One exchange made one filing and waited out the clock, and the category got a citable public document describing the conditions under which a whole product class is lawful. Nothing produced by four thousand seven hundred self-certifications does that.
The honest other half: the three metals perpetuals approved on 3 September carry no published order in their database records. Under 40.3(d)(1) an approval can simply happen when the clock runs out. The route can produce a reasoned document, and it can also produce silence.
The Commission has written down that this is how to get a definitive answer
None of this is reading between the lines. In its June 2026 proposal on prediction markets and public interest determinations, the Commission says a prediction market would be able to receive a definitive resolution of any question about the applicability of the gaming prohibition in Regulation 40.11(a)(1) by submitting a contract for approval under Regulation 40.3. It adds that staff may, on request, look at a draft and give guidance, while noting in a footnote that such guidance is preliminary and non binding.
The same proposal traces the point back to the 2011 adopting release for Part 40, where the Commission said an entity could obtain assurance that the Commission had reviewed and did not object to a submission on the enumerated activity prohibitions by using the approval route.
So the answer the industry has spent 2026 asking courts, state regulators and comment dockets to supply has been available by filing, at the regulator's own suggestion, for fifteen years. We went through what the same division put in writing about filing quality in our piece on the two staff letters of 2026. This is the other half of that story.
The cost of the slower door is real, and smaller than it looks
Three costs are usually given for not using it.
- Time. Forty five days, extendable to ninety. For a contract resolving next weekend that is fatal. For a template an exchange intends to relist hundreds of times it is one product cycle.
- The fee. Appendix A to Part 40 requires a check with the application and says the amount is set annually by the Commission and published in the Federal Register. The most recent schedule published under that instruction is the notice of 10 March 2004, which set six thousand dollars for a single futures contract and six hundred for each additional related contract. Whatever the figure is in 2026, an obligation last republished twenty two years ago is not what keeps products off the approval route.
- The risk of being told no. This one is genuine, and 40.3(e)(2) is why. But an exchange that believes its contract complies and will not put that belief in front of the regulator is telling the market something about the belief.
One oddity for anyone about to file: the Commission's listing procedures page still directs approval requests to arrive by mail or email while self-certifications go through the electronic portal, yet KalshiEX's GOLDPERP cover letter is headed submitted via CFTC portal.
A floor the category could set for itself this year
We are not arguing that every event contract should go through approval. Most plainly should not. The volume is enormous, the templates repeat, and a forty five day queue in front of a football fixture is nobody's idea of a functioning market.
We are arguing something narrower and harder to refuse. A venue knows which of its contracts are the contested ones: the market whose settlement source is a single organisation with an interest in the outcome, the market sitting on the edge of a state gambling statute, the first contract in a class nobody has listed before. For that handful, the choice between a certification the exchange writes for itself and an approval the regulator writes in public is a product decision about how much of your reasoning you are willing to show.
The commitment we ask signatories to make is that the answer should be visible before anyone has to demand it. An exchange that puts its hardest contract through Regulation 40.3, publishes the analysis rather than segregating it under a confidentiality request, and files the source agency contract that paragraph (a)(5) asks for, has done more for the standard of this category in one filing than a year of comment letters. It also ends up holding a document no future court, state attorney general or rulemaking can take away from it.
If that is the floor your venue already tries to meet, the commitment is open.
Where these documents are
Both rules and the appendices sit in the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations at Part 40, and the individual filing records, including the BTCPERP and GOLDPERP entries with their attachments, are in the Commission's public products database. Every count above was taken from it on 18 September 2026 and will move as new filings arrive.