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Comment by orblivion | Hacker News Reader

Kalshi got the goahead from an appeals court to list election bets. I think Robinhood added election bets soonafter. Is there a reason that wouldn't apply to Polymarket? Granted, Polymarket was operating before that ruling.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-federal-court-upholds-rulin...

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The Wall Street Journal version of the OP article seems to indicate that the ruling did not apply to Polymarker due to it’s settlement with the CFTC in 2022 - but the language used is a little unclear:

> Polymarket has blocked access to Americans since 2022, following a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which accused the company of running an unregistered derivatives-trading platform. Traders say the ban on U.S. users can be circumvented using virtual private networks.

>Election betting was legalized in the U.S. under a recent federal court ruling, but only for CFTC-regulated markets, so Polymarket has remained off-limits to Americans.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/fbi-polymarket-ceo-investiga...

Would scream civil instead of criminal.

Has nothing to do with elections and all to do with being an unregulated market that has zero KYC.

An unrigged market like Robinhood*

Kalshi is allowed to offer Futures under supervision of the CFTC[1]. The CFTC had previously said that prediction markets are not futures (they claimed they are illegal gaming), and Kalshi sued to get a ruling that they are futures.

Polymarket has avoided coming under regulation by the CFTC by avoiding US users. For their markets to be legal under current regulations they'd have to have all their markets approved by CFTC.

[1] https://kalshi.com/blog/article/how-is-kalshi-regulated

Even if election bets are legal, the betting market is still highly regulated.

What rake did I just step on? I'm getting downvoted for this.

I think it's the perception that your comment assumes that the accusations by Polymarket that the Biden admin are targeting them for predicting Trump are true.

I see. Well that was not my intention here.

Yes, because Polymarket offers sports markets, which are still illegal in the US (for US users, anyway). Kalshi has been careful to offer markets in basically everything except sports.

It should be obvious what happened here: Polymarket has been offering grey or black markets to users, using only IP address as the discriminator, which is very easy to work around. They've operated under the Feds' radar for quite some time, and the Feds noticed them after they started getting significant press regarding the election.

The election is the reason they got noticed, but the likely crime itself is sports, not elections.

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