The comment window on the proposal that would decide which prediction market contracts are contrary to the public interest closed on 27 July 2026. The Federal Register notice setting out Prediction Markets; Public Interest Determinations (RIN 3038-AF65, 91 FR 35806, published 12 June 2026) put it plainly in its dates section, and the deadline was never moved. As of 19 September 2026 the regulations.gov docket CFTC-2026-1189 nevertheless holds 1,397 submissions, and four of them arrived in September. All four came from tribal governments or from organisations representing them, including a letter from the Fort Belknap Indian Community and a submission from the White Earth Nation. That is worth more attention than it has had, because the list of who turned up is a map of whose agreement this category still does not have.
The index of who wrote is a shorter document than the pile they wrote
We pulled the full comment index for docket CFTC-2026-1189 from the official regulations.gov API on 19 September 2026 and counted it. The docket carried 1,397 unique submissions. Of those, 1,218 were filed under a personal name and ten were filed anonymously. That leaves 160 submissions from 148 named organisations, which is the part of the record that a rulemaking actually reads.
The first thing to fix is a confusion that travels with these numbers. This is not the docket with roughly 3,500 comments. That one is CFTC-2026-0331, the advance notice from March 2026, and we wrote about what its size does and does not tell you in Forty Questions Went Out and Two Proposals Came Back. The June proposal has its own docket and its own, smaller record. Anyone quoting one number while linking the other is quoting the wrong file.
One posted date carries 1,253 of the 1,397 filings
Sorted by the date regulations.gov posted them, the record is not a steady stream. It is one day. Our count of the index found 1,253 submissions posted on 28 July 2026, the day after the deadline, and 33 posted on 27 July itself. Everything else in three months amounts to about a hundred filings.
This is a publishing artefact rather than a stampede, and the distinction matters if you are going to cite the number. Posted date is not received date. The docket entry for the tribal organisations' letter of 11 September 2026, for example, carries a receive date of 11 September and a posted date of 16 September. The 28 July spike is the agency clearing everything that arrived by the deadline, in one batch, on one morning. A headline that treats it as a surge of last-minute public feeling would be describing the mailroom, not the public.
The useful reading runs the other way. Twelve submissions were posted on or after 1 August 2026. In a docket of 1,397, that dozen is where the record kept moving after everyone else had gone home, and it is almost entirely institutional.
Sixty-five of the hundred and forty-eight organisations are tribal
Counting the named organisations in the index by hand gives the single most striking fact in this docket. Sixty-five of the 148, responsible for 69 of the 160 organisational filings, are tribal nations, tribal gaming commissions, tribal gaming enterprises or tribal gaming associations. The Navajo Nation, the Tohono O'odham Nation, the Mohegan Tribe of Indians of Connecticut, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the Penobscot Nation, the Tulalip Tribes and the Poarch Band of Creek Indians all filed, alongside the Indian Gaming Association and its state-level counterparts in Arizona, California, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Washington.
Set that against the document they were answering. The full text of the proposal runs to roughly 76,500 words. The word tribal appears in it sixteen times. The Commission does acknowledge the framework: it writes that the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, codified at 25 U.S.C. 2701 and following, "establishes a comprehensive federal framework for the regulation of gaming on Indian lands", it notes the role of Tribal-State compacts, and it states that "Commission staff has met with Indian tribal governments concerning prediction markets and the Commission invites Indian tribal governments and other concerned parties to provide comments". The invitation was accepted at a volume the sixteen mentions do not prepare you for.
Forty-four states signed one letter and three senators signed two more
The states came in as a bloc. One entry in the index is a joint comment whose title names Ohio, Kentucky, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee and Utah "and 36 other States", which is 44 of them in a single filing. The National Conference of State Legislatures filed separately. So did several state gambling regulators in their own right, among them the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board and the Arizona Department of Gaming.
Congress is in the file too, in small numbers and on both sides of the aisle. Senator David McCormick filed on 14 July 2026. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Brian Schatz filed jointly, posted on 28 July 2026. Three senators is not a wave. It is, however, three more than most derivatives rulemakings attract, and it tells an operator that this file is read in places where commodity rules normally are not.
Every major league filed, and so did the companies that sell the data
The sports layer of this docket is unusually complete. The National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and the National Collegiate Athletic Association each filed. So did the ATP Tour, the International Tennis Integrity Agency and a joint submission from the men's major professional player associations. The suppliers filed separately from the competitions: Stats Perform, Sportradar and GRID eSports each appear in the index under their own name.
Two entries in the same docket are not comments at all. One is titled Meeting with NFL, posted 23 July 2026, and another Meeting with Xchange Alpha, posted 22 July 2026. Meeting records sit in the file next to written submissions and are read as part of the same record. We looked at what that does to a comment count in the piece on the earlier docket, where the Commission itself folded staff meetings into the views it attributed to commenters. The practical point for anyone reading a docket total is that some of the entries are rooms, not letters.
The venues that would be regulated are a minority of the named filers
Count the firms whose own products are the subject of the rule and the number is smaller than the noise around it. Kalshi filed five submissions. QCX LLC and QC Clearing LLC, together Polymarket US, filed once. ForecastEx, the North American Derivatives Exchange, Sporttrade, Topstep and several newer venues each filed once. The established derivatives industry came in alongside them: CME Group, Nasdaq, Cboe, Intercontinental Exchange, Nodal Exchange with Nodal Clear, Optiver, the Futures Industry Association and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.
The casino and lottery industry filed as a separate bloc again: the American Gaming Association, DraftKings, Boyd Gaming, the Nevada Resort Association, the Casino Association of New Jersey, the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers, the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries and the World Lottery Association. The crypto and venture layer is there too, including Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm Operations, the Crypto Council for Innovation, The Digital Chamber, and a joint filing by the Hyperliquid Policy Center and Multicoin Capital Management. On the other side sit Better Markets, which filed on its own and again with Public Citizen and fourteen other organisations, plus Stop Predatory Gambling, Democracy Defenders Fund and Oregon Consumer Justice.
Add it up and the shape is clear. The authority being exercised here, the special rule for event contracts at 7 U.S.C. 7a-2(c)(5)(C), is addressed to registered exchanges and to nobody else. In a rulemaking about prediction markets, the prediction market operators are outnumbered several times over by parties who do not trade on them and do not want to. That is not a complaint about the process. It is a description of the category's standing, and standing is the thing a voluntary standard is for.
A private roundtable on 14 September put a pause on the table
The freshest document in the docket is also the one nobody has written about. On 15 September 2026 the CFTC posted a meeting record titled Meeting of CFTC Tribal Roundtable, available as a two-page memorandum on the agency's own letterhead. It puts the meeting on 14 September 2026 and lists Chairman Selig, Amir Zaidi and Emma Johnston as participating, with eight further CFTC staff present but not participating.
The Commission's own summary of what was discussed opens with a "request for pause on rulemaking of 40.11 to undergo formal tribal consultation with individual tribes and tribal leadership, DOJ, DOI, NIGC". The rest of the summary lists sports event contracts, the effect of prediction markets on tribal sovereignty, gaming revenue and economic development, and the interaction between the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and the Commodity Exchange Act. Seventeen organisations attended, among them the National Congress of American Indians, the Indian Gaming Association, the National Tribal Gaming Commissioners and Regulators, the Coalition of Large Tribes and the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen's Association.
The letter that set the terms is in the docket as well. Twelve tribal organisations wrote to Chairman Michael S. Selig on 11 September 2026, in a thirteen-page letter posted on 16 September, accepting the invitation while stating that the closed-door session "is not a substitute for government-to-government consultation". They note that the signing organisations represent most tribal nations in the United States but are not themselves the sovereign nations, and they ask the Commission to run consultations across the country and to coordinate with the Department of the Interior, the National Indian Gaming Commission and the Department of Justice.
Two earlier requests asked for more time and did not get it
The same letter attaches the history. On 27 July 2026, the deadline day itself, tribal organisations asked the Commission for formal consultation and for at least a sixty-day extension of the comment period. On 7 August 2026 the National Congress of American Indians wrote separately, outside the rulemaking process, asking the Commission to suspend further action toward finalising the amendments to Rule 40.11 until consultation had happened.
Neither request changed the deadline. The signatories are careful about the legal footing: they acknowledge that Executive Order 13175, published at 65 FR 67249 on 9 November 2000, does not bind independent agencies, and they rest on section 8 of that order, which encourages them to comply, together with the federal trust relationship. They also make a point that any operator should register: giving tribal governments the same chance as the general public to file a written comment is not, on their reading, consultation at all.
What an operator should take out of a filing index
This is the part that concerns us rather than the lawyers. A venue reading its own rulemaking file usually reads it for the legal arguments. The index deserves an hour of its own, because it answers a question the arguments do not: who has to be satisfied before this product is settled, and who has no route to satisfaction inside the process as designed.
Sixty-five tribal bodies filed into a docket whose underlying proposal mentions them sixteen times, and seven weeks after the deadline they are still filing, because the channel they say they need is not the comment box. Forty-four states filed as one. Five leagues and three data vendors filed separately, each protecting a different asset. A standard built to satisfy the Commission alone would leave every one of those parties exactly where they are, which is outside, writing letters.
The six directives behind this initiative exist for the same reason. A contract whose settlement source is a third party's data, or whose subject matter sits inside someone else's regulatory framework, creates obligations to people who never agreed to anything. Our listing work, set out in the piece on how the proposed gaming definition works as a measuring stick, and the classification gap we described in the article on contracts that fall outside the gaming test, both point at the same practical habit: write down who is affected before a regulator writes it down for you.
A docket is a list of the people who will still be there afterwards
Whatever the Commission does with RIN 3038-AF65, the 148 organisations in this file do not disappear when the rule is finalised. The leagues will still own the events. The states will still run their own gambling law. The tribal nations will still hold compacts under a separate federal statute, and on the evidence of 14 September 2026 they will still be asking for a conversation that a comment period cannot give them.
A venue that treats the docket as an obstacle course reads it once and files. A venue that treats it as a stakeholder list reads it as the cheapest market research it will ever get, and writes its listing rules so that fewer of those names have a reason to object next time. That second habit is what the voluntary commitment is asking operators to make ordinary, and it costs far less in September than it does after a final rule lands.