Most of what a prediction market needs in order to defend a sports contract can be built by the venue itself. Surveillance systems, restricted participant lists, settlement rules written against an official data feed: all of it is work a determined team can finish in a quarter. Two of the six positive factors in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's proposed rule of 12 June 2026 cannot be built that way, because they are not about the contract at all. They are about whether somebody else has agreed to talk to you.
Between October 2025 and August 2026 the category produced a run of announcements involving leagues, exchanges, vendors and the regulator itself. Read against the proposal, they sort into three different things, and only one is the arrangement the rule describes.
Four of the six factors are about the contract, two are about the phone number
The proposed positive factors for gaming contracts sit in section 40.11(a)(6)(iii)(A). Four look inward at the product: settlement on an aggregate outcome rather than an isolated moment, settlement on an individual's aggregate performance across a whole game, settlement on data the Commission calls "publicly reported, league-verified, or otherwise objectively determinable", and an underlying sport that sits inside an established integrity framework with a recognised governing body, published rules and disciplinary procedures.
A venue can influence all four. It chooses what to list and what to settle against, and it can decline sports whose governance is thin. The remaining two work differently. Factor five asks whether the registered entity has established formal information sharing or coordination arrangements with the league. Factor six asks whether it maintains surveillance and trading prohibitions and coordination with relevant governing bodies. Both depend on a counterparty who has to agree. We treated the twelve factors as a self test in our earlier piece on the gaming definition. These are the two rows where the answer is not yours to give.
The codified language is also narrower than the phrase "league deal" implies. Factor five, as drafted, asks whether the entity has established "formal information-sharing or coordination arrangements with the league, governing body, or integrity monitoring organization relevant to the underlying game," and for college sport it names the National Collegiate Athletic Association specifically. Two words do the work. The first is formal, which rules out a good working relationship nobody wrote down. The second is the subject matter: it has to be information sharing or coordination. A commercial agreement is not an information sharing arrangement merely because a league signed it. If the document grants data rights, trademark rights and advertising inventory, what the venue can put in front of the Commission is a licence, not a channel.
Appendix F describes a three sided agreement, and nobody has announced one
The preamble goes further than the rule text. In Appendix F, the Commission writes that it believes "establishing formal information sharing agreements between prediction markets, the Commission, and the relevant sports integrity monitoring organization may aid prediction markets in monitoring sports event contracts for manipulation, insider trading and other compliance issues."
Read the parties again. There are three, and the middle one is the regulator. Everywhere else in the proposal the Commission describes itself as the body evaluating the arrangement. Here it is a participant in it. As of 29 August 2026 no tripartite agreement of that shape has been publicly announced by any exchange, league or integrity monitor. What exists instead is a set of two sided agreements that cover most of the same ground while leaving the triangle open at one corner.
Four commitments that amount to a seat at your listing meeting
Appendix F does not leave the content of such an arrangement to the imagination. It sets out four things an agreement with a governing body could commit the prediction market to do: report suspicious trading activity or trading by prohibited traders to that body; cooperate by providing certain data in connection with sports integrity investigations; consult with governing bodies on proposed event contracts; and consult, where appropriate, on integrity related restrictions applying to marketing, participant protections and event contract design.
The first two are the easy half. They are reactive and they cost a venue nothing it was not already collecting. The third and fourth are the expensive half. Consulting on proposed contracts means a league sees your listing pipeline before it is live, and consulting on marketing restrictions means it sees how you advertise. That is a standing invitation for an outside party to say no to a product you wanted to ship, and it is why this factor cannot be satisfied in a hurry. The terms are not technical. They are about how much of your own roadmap you expose.
The regulator signed with the leagues before the exchanges did
The first formal document of this kind did not involve an exchange at all. On 19 March 2026 the CFTC announced a memorandum of understanding with Major League Baseball, release 9199-26, establishing a framework to exchange information "in a manner consistent with applicable law, which will enable both parties to more swiftly respond to incidents and better anticipate emerging trends."
Two months later the structure was repeated with hockey. On 21 May 2026 the Commission and the National Hockey League signed a comparable memorandum, release 9235-26, committing both sides to designate representatives, communicate regularly, share information confidentially and coordinate on the integrity of hockey and of event contracts listed on CFTC regulated exchanges. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman described it as strengthening the league's ability to identify, deter and address risks.
Neither memorandum has an exchange as a party, and that inverts the assumption most venues work under. The relationship between the sport and the regulator was formalised first, on terms no venue negotiated. A prediction market that later wants to point at a coordination arrangement is joining a conversation that already has two participants and a shape.
The hockey partnership was written as a commercial document
The best known league agreement in the category came a year earlier and is a different animal entirely. On 22 October 2025 the NHL announced multiyear partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket, naming both as official prediction market partners. What the league granted was access to official NHL proprietary data, rights to use NHL marks, logos and official designations, the right for brokers and merchants to use those marks to identify their products, and brand exposure through digitally enhanced dasherboards and blue line signage on national broadcasts.
Every element of that is commercial. The announcement does not describe information sharing protocols, restricted market types, or a route for reporting suspicious trading to the league. That absence is not evidence of bad faith, and operational arrangements may well exist alongside the deal without appearing in a press release. But factor five is proved by content, not by a signature. A venue that walks into a review with a rights agreement and calls it a coordination arrangement is inviting staff to read the document.
Baseball wrote the restriction into the deal itself
The agreement announced on the same day as the first CFTC memorandum shows what the other version looks like. In its release of 19 March 2026, Major League Baseball named Polymarket its official prediction market exchange partner, with access to marks and logos and to official league data distributed by Sportradar. It also described an integrity framework under which the parties work together to restrict markets that present an integrity risk to the sport, and it named three of them: individual pitches, manager decisions and umpire performance.
That last clause is the fourth Appendix F bullet, executed and made public more than two months before the June proposal listed it as a factor. It also maps almost exactly onto the proposal's negative factors, which count against a contract settling solely by reference to the judgment calls of referees or umpires, or to a discrete in game action. A venue that agreed in March not to list umpire performance had, without needing to know it, removed a row from the negative column and added one to the positive column.
Vendors are named in the rule, which is the part most venues can actually reach
The third counterparty in factor five is the integrity monitoring organisation, and this is where the largest exchanges have moved fastest. On 8 June 2026 Sportradar announced a multi year global agreement with Kalshi covering official data, live odds and integrity services, namely its UFDS AI suspicious behaviour detection and the Sportradar Integrity Exchange, a network for sharing integrity threats.
Two months later, on 5 August 2026, Genius Sports announced an official data, media and integrity partnership with Kalshi under which the exchange settles sports contracts against official data and, in the announcement's own words, will "participate in Genius Sports' established information-sharing processes, restricting certain market types and enhancing visibility."
Because the rule text names integrity monitoring organisations alongside leagues, these arrangements plausibly count. The open question is degree. Joining a vendor's network is a different commitment from an arrangement with the governing body itself, and only the second gives a league a route to say no to a proposed contract. A venue relying on vendor membership should expect to be asked which of the four Appendix F commitments it has made.
Five clubs are not a governing body
The August wave of announcements sits outside the factor entirely. On 25 August 2026, as Fortune reported, Kalshi announced multiyear brand partnerships with five Major League Baseball clubs, the Braves, Red Sox, Dodgers, Padres and Giants, covering stadium signage, ballpark naming rights, radio and fan activations, while still pursuing a separate league level partnership.
For a business trying to reach baseball fans those deals are an obvious move, and nothing about them is improper. They simply do not touch factor five, which names the league, the governing body and the integrity monitoring organisation. A club is none of the three. It cannot hold a prohibited participant list for the sport, take an integrity referral for the competition, or restrict a market type across a league.
The league that declined a deal went to the regulator instead
The counterexample is the National Football League, which has taken neither an exchange partnership nor a memorandum with the Commission. Front Office Sports reported on 28 July 2026, in an article by Ben Horney, that the league filed a comment letter signed by Brendon Plack, its senior vice president for public policy and government affairs, arguing that the proposal does not go far enough. On that account the NFL asked for a minimum trading age of 21 and for outright prohibitions on categories vulnerable to manipulation rather than case by case review, naming discretionary officiating decisions, individual player performance and outcomes knowable in advance such as coaching and roster moves. The letter is quoted as saying the league believes "these objectionable contracts are detrimental to the long-term health of these markets, to the public, and to the leagues." We could not retrieve the filing itself from the public docket, so that wording rests on the reporting.
For a venue that is the harder of the two worlds. A league inside an arrangement negotiates over a contract you proposed. A league outside one argues to the regulator for a rule that removes the category, in a proceeding where you cannot answer it directly. Which posture a league takes is something an exchange influences by whether it showed up before it needed something.
Day thirty is not a negotiating window
The reason this is a question of sequence rather than intent is the review calendar. Under the proposal a review can be opened only within ten days of a contract being listed, and the exchange's substantive written response, the one place where it can propose a contract modification, is due at day thirty. We went through that timetable in our piece on the right to respond. Thirty days is enough to write a filing about an arrangement you already have. It is not enough to open negotiations with a professional league, agree the scope of an integrity referral, move it through two legal departments and produce a signed document.
So a venue that started the conversation in 2025 can attach an agreement to its day thirty response, and one that starts after a written determination arrives will be explaining why it has nothing to attach, in a proceeding whose outer limit under the Special Rule at 7 U.S.C. 7a-2(c)(5)(C) the Commission cannot extend on its own. The same gap opens in any sport with no governing body worth the name, which is where sports first became the category's weakest legal flank.
The file that answers factor five
None of this requires waiting for a final rule. The proposal was published on 12 June 2026 and the comment period closed on 27 July 2026, so the factor list is drafting, not law. But it is drafting by the body that would run the review, and for every sport in the book the answers are either on paper or they are not.
- Which counterparty do we have a written arrangement with for this sport: the league, the governing body, an integrity monitoring organisation, or nobody?
- Does that document contain an information sharing or coordination obligation, or only data, marks and advertising rights?
- Which of the four Appendix F commitments does it cover, and which would the counterparty refuse today?
- Has a referral ever gone through the channel, and how long did an acknowledgement take?
- If we list a contract this sport would object to, does anybody find out before it trades?
The last question separates a channel from a formality. An arrangement nobody has used is a document, not a capability. That is the problem we set out in our piece on settlement risk, in a different costume: the layer everybody assumes is solved is the one never tested under load.
A relationship cannot be bought in the quarter you need it
Directive 05 of our manifest says standards are set against the jurisdiction that regulates next, not only the one that has not yet. Factor five is an unusually literal example, because it turns a soft commercial question, how well do you get on with the sport you trade, into a documentary one a regulator would score. The venues that do well out of it will not be the ones with the most league logos on their marketing pages. They will be the ones that can produce a signed page naming who receives a suspicious trading report, who gets consulted before a contract is listed, and what happens when the answer is no.
That page takes months to produce and its value is that it exists before anyone asks for it. Everything else in the sports factor list can be built under deadline. This one is built early or not at all.