Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Michael Selig has said the regulator is in talks with every major US professional sports league to strengthen oversight of sports-related prediction markets and crack down on potential insider trading.
“We’ve entered into a memorandum of understanding with Major League Baseball, and we’re in talks with all the professional sports leagues,” he told brokerage conference, FINRA, in Washington on Tuesday, according to Coindesk.
Selig’s comments come as prediction markets come under fire from both state lawmakers and the gambling industry.
In an interview with Axios this week, Selig argued that prediction markets and traditional sportsbooks are “different products, parallel regimes,” maintaining that event contracts should fall under federal derivatives law rather than state gambling regulations.
