Between 2 April and 23 June 2026 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed suit in federal court against nine states over event contracts. Over roughly the same period it filed briefs in three appellate matters where it was not a party, and on two occasions it issued an order under its own authority. Neither of those orders was addressed to a state. Both were addressed to the exchange.
For anyone operating a venue, the question is not whether the Commission defends federal jurisdiction. It plainly does, repeatedly and on the record. The practical question is which of its instruments will actually exist in the state where your positions are open, because the five it has used so far do entirely different things, and what decides which one arrives is not how aggressive the state was. It is who filed first, and against whom. What follows is a map of that, as it stood on 17 October 2026, built from the Commission's own releases rather than from a summary of them.
Nine suits arrived one or two at a time across twelve weeks
The sequence began on 2 April 2026, when the Commission announced in release 9206-26 that it had sued Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against state enforcement aimed at registered designated contract markets. One week later it went further in Arizona alone: release 9208-26 of 9 April records a move to enjoin that state's criminal as well as civil proceedings, and release 9211-26 of 10 April reports that the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona issued a temporary restraining order barring the state from continuing to pursue criminal charges against registered markets.
The rest followed one or two at a time. New York on 24 April, in the Southern District of New York, per release 9218-26. Wisconsin on 28 April, per release 9220-26. Minnesota on 19 May, in a release the Commission titled CFTC Sues Minnesota to Block State Law. Rhode Island on 28 May. New Mexico on 12 June, in the Commission's words a state attempting to infringe on federal jurisdiction, per release 9251-26. Kentucky on 23 June, per release 9260-26. The full list of nine is recited by the Commission itself in release 9267-26 of 14 July 2026, which also names its amicus appearances in the Sixth and Ninth Circuits and in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Two things follow from the shape of that calendar. The first is that this was not a campaign launched at a chosen moment against a chosen list. Each filing followed a state step, which means the federal instrument is reactive by construction, and that in every state there is an interval, sometimes months long, in which a state action exists and no federal filing does. The second is that the list has stopped growing. Checked against the Commission's own press release index through 17 October 2026, no release after 14 July announces a suit against a tenth state. Nine is still nine, three months on.
One of the nine was not a complaint the Commission filed
The Rhode Island entry deserves separating out, because the headline and the body of the same document describe different procedural acts. Release 9238-26 of 28 May 2026 is titled CFTC Sues to Block State Enforcement in Rhode Island Amid Ongoing Efforts to Preserve Jurisdiction. The text underneath describes a motion to intervene in a lawsuit in the District of Rhode Island that a registered exchange had already brought after the state threatened enforcement.
That is a materially different posture from the eight original complaints, and not a small one. An intervenor inherits a case somebody else shaped: the claims pleaded, the record built, the schedule agreed, the appellate strategy. If the venue's own complaint is thin, the federal appearance attaches to a thin complaint. Nobody in the industry treats a first-draft preemption filing as a document that will later have a federal agency standing on it, and in at least one state that is exactly what happened. It is a reason to write the venue's own first filing as though it were the foundation of the federal position, because sometimes it becomes one.
In the appeal that mattered the Commission was only on the brief
Three times the Commission appeared without being a party. On 24 April 2026 it filed in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. KalshiEx LLC, No. SJC-13906, arguing preemption; the filing is announced in release 9219-26. On 12 May 2026, per release 9230-26, it filed in the Sixth Circuit in KalshiEx LLC v. Schuler, No. 26-3196, stating that the district court in Ohio had taken what the Commission called an improperly narrow view of its jurisdiction. Earlier, on 17 February 2026, it had filed in the Ninth Circuit; the brief itself is captioned in No. 25-7187, North American Derivatives Exchange, Inc. d/b/a Crypto.com Derivatives North America v. The State of Nevada, and appears in support of the appellant and in support of reversal. Worth noting for a venue reading the map: that brief backed a different exchange's appeal, not the one most of the coverage was about.
What an amicus brief buys became measurable on 25 September 2026, when the Sixth Circuit decided Schuler together with KalshiEX LLC v. Orgel, No. 26-5235. The opinion affirmed the Ohio denial of a preliminary injunction and vacated the Tennessee injunction. Its counsel listing is the detail to sit with: the Commission's lawyers appear under ON BRIEF for amici curiae, while the argument for the state was made by the Office of the Ohio Attorney General. The Commission wrote; it did not stand up. The product holding in that opinion is a separate subject, and we have taken it apart in The Exchange Won the Preemption Point and Lost on the Product.
An amicus brief is an argument. It is not a party's claim, it carries no entitlement to a remedy, and it cannot be enforced by the venue whose business the argument happens to support. In a state where the federal appearance is a brief, the exchange carries the litigation end to end and should budget accordingly.
Both orders that commanded anyone commanded the exchange
On 14 July 2026 the Commission did something other than ask a court for relief. Release 9267-26 and the order itself record two acts at once: a stay of KalshiEX's self-certified emergency rule under Commission Regulation 40.6(c)(1), and a direction to the exchange to fulfill open trades involving Michigan residents, resting on section 8a(9) of the Commodity Exchange Act, 7 U.S.C. section 12a(9). The trigger was a Michigan state court requiring affected trades to be voided, cancelled and refunded. And Michigan, the one state whose court had reached into the book itself, is not among the nine the Commission sued.
It happened a second time four weeks later. Release 9281-26 of 11 August 2026 reports that after the exchange notified a market emergency arising from the New York Attorney General's complaint of 31 July, the Commission exercised emergency authority and required the exchange to continue operating in accordance with the Core Principles. New York was already a defendant in the Commission's own April suit. The federal order still pointed at the venue.
That is the finding worth carrying out of this whole map. Federal jurisdiction is not only a shield that gets raised in front of an exchange when a state moves. It is simultaneously a source of obligation pointed at that exchange, and it can land in the same week as the state order, telling the venue to do something the state has forbidden. We walked through what a state block does to a position that is already open in Geoblocking Stops the Next Trade and Leaves the Open One, and through whose interest the emergency power actually serves in Who Is Protected When a Regulator Declares an Emergency?.
The case that reached the Supreme Court has no federal filing in it
The amicus list the Commission recites in its 14 July release names the Sixth Circuit, the Ninth Circuit and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The Third Circuit is absent from it. That is the appeal the exchange won, and it is the one that turned into a petition for certiorari.
The docket in Flaherty v. KalshiEX, LLC, No. 26-299, read on 17 October 2026, shows the petition filed 2 September 2026, the response deadline extended to 9 November 2026, and eleven amicus briefs on file, the newest of them dated 8 October. Neither the United States nor the Commission appears anywhere on it. A former chairman of the Commission, Gary Gensler, filed on 8 October in his own name, which is not the same thing.
Read that carefully rather than dramatically. A federal agency frequently says nothing at the certiorari stage, and the Court can invite the Solicitor General's views at a later point, so the silence is not evidence of a position. What it is, for planning purposes, is a reminder that the single proceeding most likely to decide the question for the whole category contains no federal filing at all as of this date, and that a venue betting its compliance posture on a federal appearance in that case is betting on something that has not happened.
The operator filed the suits that never came
Where the federal instrument did not arrive, at least one operator built its own. The Block reported on 16 September 2026, in an article by Timmy Shen, that Underdog had sued Connecticut in federal court over a cease and desist order, arguing that the Commission holds exclusive jurisdiction over trading on its exchange and seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, and that earlier the same month the company had filed against Ohio, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Washington on the same theory.
Line those six states up against the Commission's nine and the gap is the point. Wisconsin and New Mexico overlap. Ohio and Massachusetts are states where the federal appearance was a brief in somebody else's appeal. Connecticut was sued by the Commission in April, yet the operator still filed its own case against a later state order. Washington appears in neither the suit list nor the amicus list. An operator that waits for the federal filing in a state like Washington is waiting for a document that does not exist, and the cost of that discovery is measured in days of enforcement exposure.
What a venue can write down before the instrument arrives
Directive 05 of this initiative's commitment reads: standards are set against the jurisdiction that regulates next, not only the one that has not yet. Applied to this map, it is not a legal position. It is a document a venue should be able to print on one page, per state, without a lawyer spending a week assembling it:
- the state step that exists, with its date and its form: letter, civil action, criminal referral, or a statute with an effective date;
- whether a federal filing exists in that state, and which of the five kinds it is: the Commission's own complaint, an intervention in somebody else's case, an amicus brief, an order addressed to the venue, or nothing;
- who the plaintiff is in the live proceeding and who therefore controls the schedule, because in an intervention that is not the Commission;
- what the venue is required to do if a state order reaches open positions, and what it is required to do if a federal order reaches the same positions in the same week, written out as two procedures rather than one hope that they will not collide;
- which of the venue's own filings a later federal intervention would attach itself to, and whether that filing is good enough to carry it;
- what a user in that state sees on the market card, and on what trigger that display changes.
None of this requires a prediction about preemption, which is the reason it is worth doing. The category spent 2026 arguing about whether event contracts are swaps, and that argument will be settled by somebody else. The thing a venue controls is whether, on the morning a state order and a federal order arrive together, it has to work out from scratch which instrument it is holding. The map above exists in public. The per-state version of it does not exist until somebody at the venue writes it, and the firms that have written it are the ones we would expect to still be here when the question is finally answered. That is the floor the commitment asks for, and it is lower than it sounds.