On 25 June 2026 Senators John R. Curtis and Adam B. Schiff sent a three page letter to Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Michael S. Selig, with six numbered questions and a request for written answers by 10 July 2026. The senators' own press release frames it around reporting by The Wall Street Journal (Katherine Long, Caitlin Ostroff, Neil Mehta and Brenna T. Smith), cited in the letter's first footnote, which described simulated trading websites, staged transactions and undisclosed paid creator content used to promote prediction market activity. Most of the attention went to that allegation and to the jurisdictional fight in questions five and six. The sentence worth keeping is question four, and it has nothing to do with who wins that fight.
Question four is a column header, not an accusation
The letter asks the Commission, word for word: "What consumer-protection standards does the CFTC currently require of prediction-market operators with respect to advertising, age verification, addiction warnings, responsible-gaming tools, affiliate marketing, and influencer disclosures?" Six surfaces, named in one line, by people who do not run a venue. As of 21 October 2026 no answer appears in the Commission's press releases or on either senator's newsroom page, and the 10 July deadline has passed without a published reply.
That silence is the interesting part, because it is a fair silence. For four of the six, an honest answer from the Commission is close to nothing, and saying so would not be an admission of neglect. The relevant rules were written for grain futures and swap dealers. They were not written for a retail surface where a first trade follows a short video. We have argued the point from our side in an earlier piece on the three 2026 letters that all asked the regulator to constrain somebody other than the writer. Question four is the same shape, and it is still the best gap analysis the category has been given, because an outsider wrote down the six places where an operator ought to be able to produce a document.
What a designated contract market is actually held to
The obligation that comes closest is Core Principle 12. Its implementing rule, 17 CFR 38.651, requires a designated contract market to have and enforce rules designed to promote fair and equitable trading and "to protect the market and market participants from abusive practices", and to hold detection methods and resources suited to its own trading system. It is a market integrity instruction. It names no advertising content, no minimum age, no warning text and no deposit limit. The separate route is the anti-manipulation and anti-fraud prohibition in 17 CFR 180.1, which reaches deception but only after the deception exists.
The rule that would address question four directly has been a single sentence on a roadmap since August 2026. It has not become text: the Commission's Federal Register output since 15 September 2026 runs to eight documents, among them the two swap definition documents of 19 October 2026, and none of them is the announced amendment to parts 38 and 40. So for the moment the six rows have to be filled in from other people's rulebooks. They can be. That is the point of this piece.
Advertising is the one row where something has already landed
On 7 August 2026 the Commission's Division of Market Oversight and Market Participants Division sent a letter on misleading and deceptive practices to regulated entities and their affiliates, announced in press release 9278-26. Its finding on bookmaker style odds is quotable and narrow: such a display "is likely to mislead market participants about the nature of the transaction into which they are entering". The legal anchors are anti-fraud and Core Principle 12, not a consumer protection standard, which is exactly why it reached affiliates as well as exchanges.
The detailed advertising rulebook belongs to the National Futures Association. Compliance Rule 2-29 bars promotional material likely to deceive, requires any mention of profit to carry an equally prominent discussion of the risk of loss, and in subsection (h) requires audio or video material that makes a specific trading recommendation or describes the extent of past or potential profit to be filed with the association's Promotional Material Review Team at least ten days before first use. It binds futures commission merchants, introducing brokers, pool operators and trading advisors. It does not bind the exchange.
A venue that says it has advertising covered should be able to name who reviews a script before it ships, how long that review takes, and where the reviewed versions are archived. Ten days is a useful number precisely because somebody else already decided it was workable.
Age verification lives in federal rules as an identity field
There is one place where federal law makes anyone in the event contract chain learn a customer's age. 31 CFR 1026.220(a)(2)(i)(A) obliges a futures commission merchant or introducing broker, before opening an account, to obtain the customer's name, date of birth for individuals, address and identification number. That is a customer identification programme built for anti-money-laundering purposes. It collects a date. It does not set a floor, it does not refuse anyone for being too young, and it reaches the intermediary rather than the market.
So the floor is a product decision. Kalshi, in its own help centre, tells applicants they must "Be 18 years or older" and may be asked to pass a document verification (checked 21 October 2026). Nothing in the Commission's rules sets that number, and nothing prevents a venue from setting it higher. Every state gaming regime the letter invokes uses 21, and Ohio goes further than a number: rule 3775-16-03 requires accounts to be created only for patrons whose identity has been verified and documented, and requires the patron to acknowledge the legal age in a record the operator keeps.
Addiction warnings are written down in Columbus
Ohio's advertising rule, 3775-16-08, effective 15 October 2022, requires advertising to "Clearly and conspicuously include messages designed to prevent problem gambling" together with information on how to reach help, from an approved helpline. The same rule bars depicting anyone under 21 in a way that suggests participation, and bars targeting people under 21 or people with gambling problems.
Nothing of that kind exists in federal event contract rules. We are not asking for a helpline notice to be pasted into a footer, which is the version of this that gets written when a rule arrives and nobody wants it. The honest test is placement: does anything about risk appear on the surface where the position is opened, or only in a page a user reaches after looking for it? A venue that can answer that with a screenshot has the row. A venue that answers with a link in the terms of use does not.
The row the gaming code itself leaves empty
Here the picture reverses, and it is the finding we did not expect. The letter's twelfth footnote offers the American Gaming Association Responsible Marketing Code for Sports Wagering, updated 28 March 2023, as the benchmark of what traditional operators accept. Read in full, that code contains no deposit limit, no cool-off period and no self-exclusion requirement anywhere in its text. It asks for a responsible gaming message and a link to information. It does not ask for a feature.
Our third directive asks for the feature, in these words: "Deposit limits, cool-off periods and self-exclusion are product features, built into the account, not concessions granted by support staff on request." The written model for it is not in a federal rule or in an industry code. It is in state product regulation. Ohio's account rule requires an easy and obvious method, available immediately on registration and at all times afterwards, letting a patron "impose limitations for betting parameters including, but not limited to, deposits, wagers, and time-based limitations", and then adds the part that actually does the work: once a limit is set, "it must only be possible to reduce the severity of self-imposed limitations upon the expiration of the self-imposed period".
That last clause is the whole difference between a feature and a courtesy, and it is the one sentence we would lift verbatim. The evidence test for this row is not whether the setting exists. It is whether anyone inside the company can loosen it on request, and whether the attempt leaves a record.
Affiliate marketing becomes a registration question first
The affiliate row looks like marketing and turns into licensing. 7 U.S.C. 1a(31) defines an introducing broker as a person who solicits or accepts orders for contracts traded on a designated contract market without holding customer money, which is a description a sufficiently involved revenue partner can grow into without noticing. On the other side, the National Futures Association says Bylaw 1101 prohibits its members from doing business with most non-members that are required to register. We traced that layer end to end in a piece on the first screen a trader sees, and the conclusion was that the rules governing it bind the intermediary, not the venue whose contract is being sold.
The gaming code is clearer about responsibility than the federal rules are. It extends its content standards to operator-controlled messages placed in digital media "including third party internet and mobile sites, affiliate platforms", and it requires members to hand the code to "advertising agencies, media buyers, affiliates and other third parties" involved in their marketing. That is a list, a delivery and a standard. Any venue can build the same three things this quarter.
Influencer disclosure is the surface the benchmark never mentions
The word influencer appears twice in the gaming code, and both times it is about age. Advertising should not feature influencers who appeal primarily to audiences below 21, and influencers who appear in advertising should themselves be at least 21. Neither sentence is about telling an audience that the person was paid. On the exact conduct described in the letter's first footnote, the benchmark document the senators chose is silent.
The written standard for that sits with the Federal Trade Commission. 16 CFR 255.5 requires a material connection between an endorser and an advertiser to be disclosed "clearly and conspicuously", and the guides were revised at 88 FR 48092 on 26 July 2023 to cover virtual and fictional endorsers among other changes. Their status matters: 16 CFR 255.0(a) calls them "administrative interpretations of laws enforced by the Federal Trade Commission" that "provide the basis for voluntary compliance". The harder instrument arrived later. Since 21 October 2024, part 465 of the same title, the Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, published at 89 FR 68034 on 22 August 2024, prohibits fake and false consumer and celebrity testimonials and the buying of reviews outright, with civil penalties available. A staged trade filmed on a lookalike site is what that rule describes.
And the futures world already had its own version of the narrow point: rule 2-29 requires a testimonial to carry a prominent statement that it does not indicate future performance, and, where applicable, a prominent disclosure that it is paid. The standard existed in two places. It simply did not sit with the venue whose market was in the video.
The benchmark in footnote twelve was written by operators
This is the part of the letter we would put on the wall. To show what a regulated gaming market accepts, the senators did not cite a statute. They cited an industry document. The code describes itself as "This self-regulated, industry-wide program", overseen by a Code Compliance Review Board of two independent co-chairs and five member company representatives, through a complaint process open to any member of the public, and it reaches beyond its own membership on purpose: "A Reported Company does not need to be an AGA member."
That is not a contradiction to point out triumphantly. It is an argument we have been making from the other direction, and our manifest states it plainly: the floor is written by operators, not regulators, because the market that survives regulation is the one that behaved as if regulation had arrived. The gaming industry's answer to its own 2018 expansion was a code with a named board and a public complaint route, published a year after the Supreme Court decision and updated annually. It did not wait for a federal gambling regulator, and no such regulator exists.
Six rows, and what counts as having them
Question four is short enough to run as an internal exercise in an afternoon. The useful version is not a yes or no column. For each row, a venue should be able to name the document, the date it was last changed, the owner, and the artefact a sceptical outsider could inspect.
- Advertising. Who reviews material before publication, against which written content standard, and where the reviewed versions are kept. Rule 2-29 supplies the content standard and a ten day lead time for video.
- Age verification. The stated floor, the mechanism that enforces it before a position can be opened rather than at withdrawal, and what happens when identity data contradicts the declared age. The anti-money-laundering field is not the control.
- Addiction warnings. What a user sees about risk on the screen where the trade happens, not in the terms of use, and who approved the wording.
- Responsible gaming tools. Deposit, position and time limits set from the account, plus the ratchet: a limit that cannot be loosened before its period expires, and a log of every attempt.
- Affiliate marketing. A list of names rather than a diagram, a contract clause imposing the same content standard, a takedown path with a measured response time, and a documented view on whether any partner has grown into the introducing broker definition.
- Influencer disclosures. Paid partnership labelling that satisfies 16 CFR 255.5, a flat prohibition on simulated trades and lookalike interfaces, and a record of what was filmed, by whom, and from which account.
None of this is a compliance opinion, and a venue that completes all six is not thereby lawful in any state that says otherwise. What it gains is narrower and more durable. When the amendment to parts 38 and 40 eventually publishes, or when the next letter arrives from a committee rather than from two senators, the answer to question four will either be six documents with dates on them or a sentence about how nobody had required it yet. The senators wrote the question in June. The category has had four months to make the first answer true.