On 27 July 2026, the day the comment period closed on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's proposed public interest determinations for event contracts, the National Football League filed a comment letter signed by Brendon Plack, its senior vice president for public policy and government affairs. Attached as Appendix I was a second, longer letter dated 15 May 2026. Both sit in one seventeen page filing.
Read together, the two documents amount to the most detailed user protection specification anywhere in the prediction market record. A centralised self-exclusion registry. Deposit and loss limits. Cooldown periods of user-selectable length. Activity summaries. Confirmation delays on contracts that settle inside the same session. An advertising code. A minimum age of 21.
Almost every item on that list matches something this initiative asks its signatories to build, and none of it was written by anyone in the category. That second half is the subject of this article, because the order in which a standard arrives decides who holds the pen.
The older letter carries the detail, and it reached the public record late
The July letter responds to amendments the Commission published on 12 June 2026 at 91 Fed. Reg. 35,806. According to the Federal Register entry for that proposal, comments closed on 27 July 2026, so the league filed on the closing day, and the docket entry records the submission as posted eleven days later.
Appendix I is dated 15 May 2026 and responds to the Commission's advance notice of proposed rulemaking, 91 Fed. Reg. 12,516, published on 16 March 2026, whose comment window closed on 30 April 2026. The May letter was therefore written about two weeks after that window shut. A full-text search of the advance notice docket, CFTC-2026-0331, returns no filing under the league's name, and the July letter says it incorporates the earlier document "in its entirety". The letter carrying most of the substance thus became publicly readable in August, roughly twelve weeks after it was written. The Commission drafted its June proposal while that letter existed and the public did not have it, so nobody in the category could answer the specification being pressed on their regulator while it mattered.
The league went to the exchanges before it went to the regulator
Section I.A of the May letter contains a sentence that is easy to read past. The league writes that it "has sent communications to a broad range of DCMs requesting that they refrain from offering specific types of sports event contracts in categories the NFL has long referred to as 'objectionable bets.'" The request was made directly, venue by venue, before any of it was put to the Commission.
By July the framing has changed. On prohibited bettors the league writes: "Rather than rely solely on prediction markets to police their own markets, the Commission must require our previously proposed league-specific prohibited bettors list as a necessary supplement to any proposed framework." On the consumer protection tools it is blunter: those measures "must be mandated by regulation or NFA rule."
Between those two positions sits the only question this initiative exists to ask. Our manifest puts it as setting the floor the category needs "before someone sets a lower one for us." These letters are a reminder that a floor written by somebody else is not always lower. It can be higher, more prescriptive, and drafted by a party whose interest is the integrity of a game rather than the working of a market.
Four categories the league wants prohibited outright
The May letter does not argue in the abstract. Under the heading "Prohibited Contracts" it names four groups, with examples specific enough to read as a product spec.
- Easily manipulable by a single person. Whether a kicker misses a field goal, whether a quarterback's first pass is incomplete, whether a receiver's first target is incomplete, whether a running back gains fewer than a set number of yards on his first rushing attempt. Two happen away from play: broadcast mentions, and fan or celebrity attendance.
- Inherently objectionable. Player injuries, fan safety, player or fan misconduct.
- Officiating related. The timing, number or types of penalties, officiating actions and assignments, replay results, and the timing, number or results of challenges.
- Knowable in advance. The first play of the game, roster and personnel decisions, who will be traded, hired or fired together with the associated contract timelines and values, live pick-by-pick contracts on who will be drafted, and coaching decisions.
Two of these land on ground this site has walked. Broadcast mention contracts are the subject of a Commission enforcement order we covered in the case of a teleprompter operator who appeared on nobody's restricted list, and writing down which markets should never open is what we published as our own listing standard. The difference is authorship, and the league's version is the more operational of the two.
The July letter records what happened to the list. The Commission has said many such contracts may be contrary to the public interest, and the staff advisory issued by the Division of Market Oversight as CFTC Letter 26-08 reached the same assessment. But no flat prohibition was adopted, and "knowable in advance" was not addressed at all.
Directive 03 rewritten as somebody else's feature list
Section II.A of the May letter asks the Commission to establish a centralised self-exclusion registry, "potentially maintained by the NFA", which operators would check before opening an account and periodically against existing accounts, with a prohibition on marketing to anyone on it. It then asks for six account level tools: deposit and loss limit controls; time and contract notifications; plain-language activity summaries showing total deposits, contracts, net positions and cumulative profit and loss; cooldown periods of user-selectable duration; trade risk controls adapted to settlement characteristics, "including confirmation delays for contracts that settle within the same trading session"; and periodic notifications showing session duration and aggregate net result.
Set that beside Directive 03 of our manifest: "Deposit limits, cool-off periods and self-exclusion are product features, built into the account, not concessions granted by support staff on request." The overlap is near total and the disagreement is one word. We say these are features. The league's letter assumes they will not exist until a rule compels them, and adds that platform-by-platform administration makes self-exclusion and prohibited-persons lists "ineffective". Both cannot stay true for long, and the category decides which one does.
The item worth stopping on is the confirmation delay. It is not a control borrowed from another sector. It answers a contract that can be opened and settled inside one sitting, which is the structural feature that makes this product feel like a fast game. We made a related argument about what the interface teaches in the piece on who owns the first screen a trader sees.
The age argument claims no new authority is needed
The letters ask for a minimum age of 21, noting that the large majority of states which legalised sports betting set that threshold. The legal argument attached to it is the part worth reading twice. Such a restriction, the May letter says, "would be administrable under existing CFTC regulation as an eligibility screen," citing 17 C.F.R. 38.151(a) on access requirements and Core Principle 12 at 7 U.S.C. 7(d)(12), which obliges a designated contract market to enforce rules "to protect markets and market participants from abusive practices committed by any party." The letter also points to the proposal's own discussion of eligibility screens at 91 Fed. Reg. 35,850.
The league also observes that the proposal sets no minimum age for any contract. If its reading holds, the screen is available today and nothing in the rulebook has to change first, which leaves something other than authority to explain an absent age floor.
The advertising asks need no rulemaking at all
On promotion the May letter asks the Commission to direct the National Futures Association to supplement Compliance Rule 2-29 so that materials for sports event contracts carry clear and prominent disclosure of the risk of loss; so that materials characterising such contracts as a form of sports entertainment, or obscuring financial risk, are prohibited; so that "sign-up bonuses, deposit matches, risk-free trade promotions, or similar inducements" are prohibited; and so that public advertising carries information about self-exclusion and responsible trading tools. It also asks that advertising not be directed at anyone under 21 or at self-excluded individuals.
Not one of those items requires a regulation to exist. They are editorial and product decisions a venue can take in a quarter. Directive 04 sets the same expectation from the other direction, that a first-time user "learns what a price means, how a spread costs them money and how their market resolves before they learn how to deposit faster." The Commission has separately warned about incentive programmes, which we examined in the piece on why bought volume is not demand.
Margin, card funding and a named distribution channel
The May letter asks for a ban on margin trading in all sports-related contracts, reasoning that contracts which are not fully collateralised "could amplify addictive behavior and loss risk", and notes that most states with legal sports betting require pre-funded accounts. We set out the mechanics of that exposure in our own piece on margin and leverage.
The tokenisation passage is different in kind, because it names a product rather than a contract type. The letter cites Kalshi's own announcement of tokenised contracts on Solana, published on the company's blog on 1 December 2025, and argues that tokenisation is incompatible with Core Principles 2 and 4 and circumvents the eligibility, know-your-customer and surveillance requirements that apply to market participants. Whether that legal reading is right is for the Commission to decide. What is new is the framing, since a league has identified the distribution channel rather than the contract as the compliance surface. A venue whose positions can travel outside its own compliance perimeter should expect that question in writing.
Alongside it sits an insider trading ask. The letters want the Commission to state that trading a sports event contract on material nonpublic information owed to a league, team or governing body is a manipulative or deceptive device within CEA section 6(c)(1), and the May letter names the people it means: athletes, club personnel, coaches, officials, team medical staff, vendors, media partners and league employees. That is a restricted persons list drafted by the party that can populate it, a gap we described in the piece on a covered list that does not exist.
The screening arithmetic the proposal never does
The July letter's sharpest technical objection is about capacity. Proposed Rule 40.11 would provide that a Commission review "must commence no later than 10 days after the date of the listing" of a contract. The league then turns the Commission's own figures against that timetable. Footnote 298 of the proposal records 25 designated contract markets operating within the framework, with 18 further applications under review. The body states that the daily average number of event contracts listed on one of the largest prediction markets rose from approximately 1,600 in April 2025 to 162,000 in April 2026, and footnote 303 records more than 8,000 contracts trading in May 2026. Against that, the league writes, the proposal "contains no analysis of how many certified contracts the Commission could plausibly screen in ten calendar days or of staffing demands."
Two smaller points in the same section deserve attention. The current rule obliges the Commission to ask a venue to suspend a contract while review is pending, a reading the proposal's own preamble confirms when it says Rule 40.11(c)(1) "requires the Commission to request" suspension. The proposed replacement says the Commission "may request" it. And the proposal is silent on contracts already listed when a final rule takes effect, which the league warns would "immunize" contracts already on the book against review. We looked at the procedural side of the same review in the piece on what a right to respond is actually worth.
The award carve-out invites a redesign rather than a ban
The proposed definition of gaming excludes "results or outcomes of honor and award contests, or occurrences during those contests". The Commission's illustration is an award decided by a voting panel rather than by play. The league's counterexample is an award for the best offensive player of a season, which settles on what happened in games. "A contract does not cease to involve gaming merely because of an intervening vote or adjudicating mechanism," the July letter argues, and a categorical exclusion "invites evasion by insertion of an award, vote or other adjudicative step into a sports-performance-based contest solely to avoid the Special Rule."
The same section objects to a factor the proposal counts against prohibition, that banning a contract "would push trading activity into less transparent and less regulated foreign markets". Demand, the league answers, does not settle the public interest question, and "contracts imposing the greatest public interest concerns may be among the highest-traded." We treated the definition itself as a tool rather than a threat in the piece on the gaming definition as a measuring stick.
What a venue can put in writing before any of this is a rule
As of 26 September 2026 the Federal Register holds two documents under RIN 3038-AF65, the advance notice of 16 March 2026 and the proposal of 12 June 2026. Both are proposals, and no final rule has been published. That is the whole window, and it will not stay open.
Everything below comes from the league's letters rather than from us, which is the point. Each item is something a designated contract market can state publicly without waiting:
- The contract categories you will not list, with examples rather than adjectives.
- The six account tools, shipped as defaults, including the same-session confirmation delay.
- The minimum age you enforce, and the eligibility screen you enforce it through.
- Your promotional standard, stating whether you use sign-up bonuses, deposit matches or risk-free trade offers, and what risk language appears on public placements.
- Which prohibited persons list you check, who maintains it, and how often existing accounts are rechecked.
- Whether a position in your sports contracts can be held outside your compliance perimeter, tokenised or otherwise.
Three letters from other quarters asked the Commission to restrain conduct their authors did not control, and we wrote about them in the piece on requests aimed at somebody else. These two are a different object: a buildable specification, from a party that says in writing it asked the exchanges first. The Commission's third announced proposal, on consumer protection, still exists only as a sentence in a speech. Whatever goes into it will be drafted by someone reading the record, and the most specific thing in that record on user protection was written by a football league.
A standard you did not write is a standard you spend years explaining. There is still time to be the author.