The path to regulatory clarity for innovative technology in the United States runs through the agencies, and they are still hard at work in Washington this month. It's exciting to see the CFTC convene the IAC for its first meeting next week. This is where the action is. Tune in.

Farmers were the original beneficiaries of America’s derivatives markets. Futures trading was born in the grain trade in the 1800s, and federal oversight ran through the U.S. Department of Agriculture for five decades. The House and Senate Agriculture Committees oversee the CFTC to this day. On July 29, the @CFTC 's Agricultural Advisory Committee convened for the first time in more than two years. Today we filed a statement supporting the Committee’s work and the Commission’s phased approach to perpetual futures.

Today, @HyperliquidPC filed a statement in connection with the @CFTC Agricultural Advisory Committee’s July 29 meeting, its first in more than two years. We support the Commission’s phased approach to perpetual futures and share our views on product choice and how public blockchains can help modernize our markets. ⬇️

Good question. Here's a long effort at an answer: For some, insurance is an option. Best recent example of this is probably La Liga club Osasuna, which bought insurance against its own relegation this year. MLB clubs certainly have access to something similar. But PMs make that better. The insurance broker above immediately hedged its risk on prediction markets, without which the insurance contract undoubtedly would have been more expensive (or unavailable) to compensate for holding the exposure. (In an ideal world we wouldn't need the middle man, but I understand why that was appropriate there.) And its not available to most. Pickles Pub outside Camden Yards or @MagicRatSF 's parking lot outside Veterans Stadium don't have access to that, and certainly not at anything close to the cost of PM fees. There are hundreds of mom-and-pops in 30 baseball cities that make or break their year on the season. So even if insurance is available to all (and its not), all that does is turn one hedge (Company --> Prediction Market) into another (Company --> Insurance --> Prediction Market), adding a middle man and increasing costs. As for insider trading, yes its a risk, but no more so than for (say) a public company earnings report or M&A transaction in my view. I don't think we assume that people act on those, and I wouldn't make that assumption here either (the owners/execs who would know have a LOT to lose).

The skeptic's case against 24/7 markets usually centers on a single issue: a price formed at 3am on a Saturday couldn't possibly be trusted. Fair concern, but also a testable one. New research from @blockworksres tracked weekend trading on Hyperliquid across equities, commodities, FX, and indices. Weekend spreads matched or ran tighter than weekday levels, and typical trades filled at close to weekday cost, even with every other venue closed. Across 614 market-weekends, the weekend price landed closer to the eventual reopen than Friday's close 70.7% of the time. On moves over 1%, it called the direction right 94.9% of the time. About 83 cents of every dollar priced over the weekend showed up at the reopen. The skeptic’s case was tested. The 3am price wasn’t just tradeable, it was right.

Great report from @shaundadevens and @Blockworks highlighting the price discovery occurring on Hyperliquid across asset classes. 24/7 markets require infrastructure that is always on, and Hyperliquid was built for exactly that. Read the full report below.

CME in court: perps inflict "textbook competitive injury" by competing for its retail customers. CME on this week's earnings call: "we have not heard demand from our customers for these products." So which one is it?

Prediction markets topped $50 billion in trading volume last month, and the biggest names in traditional finance are moving in. Today, with @multicoin, we filed a joint comment supporting the @CFTC 's proposed prediction markets framework. These markets have grown up. The proposed framework gives them what they deserve: durable standards, known in advance, under one federal rulebook. Our comment expresses support for the Commission’s approach and offers two recommendations to make an already strong rulebook even more targeted. Read it here:

The most contested question for prediction markets is who regulates them. More than a dozen states argue in court that these markets belong under state gaming laws. But gambling laws police a house that profits when you lose. A derivatives exchange has no house; it matches buyers and sellers and earns the same fee either way. Congress saw the difference and gave the CFTC exclusive authority over event contracts, with one federal rulebook in place of a state-by-state patchwork. Today, @HyperliquidPC and @multicoin filed a joint comment in support of the CFTC's proposal, with two refinements to make it even stronger. ⬇️

This is a major structural shift, and possibly the turning point in the evolution of crypto markets away from speculating on endogenous digital commodities and into crypto market infrastructure underpinning deeper global markets. Thrilled to have Circle and USDC play such a central role here too.

CLARITY is stalled exactly where the arithmetic puts it, and attention was never the problem. 5 of 8 steps are done: House passed it 294-134, Senate Banking advanced it 15-9, calendar-eligible since June 1. The last three (60 votes in Senate, House passage, POTUS signature) are the hard part, with no cloture motion filed and about three usable Senate weeks before the August recess. Three disputes are doing the blocking: ethics/insider-trading, Section 604 developer liability, stablecoin yield. And unlike GENIUS, CLARITY has no bank-and-payments constituency forcing them shut. The real risk is inertia. Polymarket has been the live whip count: ~59% in June, sub-40% after the July 4 miss, ~43% now. It's tracking the same disputes staffers are negotiating. This isn't dead, and it's nowhere near guaranteed. The next three weeks are the closing act.

Adding legal texture to @BChillman's thread for those following the regulatory picture. @phantom's March no-action letter (CFTC Letter 26-09) already established key precedent: a non-custodial interface that provides only the technical means of access to a registered venue is not itself an introducing broker. Today's letter from @phantom and @HyperliquidPC asks the Commission to (1) codify that holding, (2) permit CFTC registrants to perform regulated functions onchain, and (3) confirm that deploying onchain smart contract infrastructure doesn't by itself trigger FCM or DCO registration. Writing settlement logic, margin accounting, or liquidation mechanisms does not, without more, make a developer a registrant. Functional equivalence alone isn't enough. This second ask is the meatiest and most operationally difficult: the custody and order-handling assumptions in the regs were written for custodial intermediaries. They don't map onto architectures where a smart contract manages margin or where settlement is atomic. The Commission needs to address this mismatch explicitly before registered venues can bring these markets to U.S. users compliantly. The mismatch also matters for users, not just registrants. Self-custody means users control their own private keys and therefore their assets. There is no intermediary, no custodial failure putting the user at risk, and no single point of compromise exposing their funds. Self-custody features aren't incidental; they're the core value proposition of onchain markets over legacy custodial infrastructure. Those features also reflect a paradigm shift in how regulators have historically regulated US financial markets. And Americans shouldn't have to give up those protections to access regulated markets. The whole point of building software onchain is that you can have both: the customer protections that come with registered venues and the security and autonomy that come with self-custody. The current regulatory gap makes that combination impossible in practice. This letter asks the Commission to close it. Registration obligations remain. They attach where they always have. Customers retain the benefits of self-custody. What changes is that the rules become administrable for how the technology actually works. Thank you to our partners at @HyperliquidPC, especially @jchervinsky and @BradBourque. We appreciate the @CFTC's willingness to tackle these difficult questions and we look forward to continuing to our engagement.

Some people build tools. Others use those tools to offer regulated financial services. Building tools shouldn't trigger registration, and using onchain tools to deliver regulated services shouldn't be off-limits to the firms already registered to provide them. Today we joined @phantom to urge the @CFTC to modernize its rules and unlock innovation for fintech firms and existing registrants alike. Let’s move our markets forward, and onchain. Read our comment here: