The commodity door
The United States settled prediction markets as a derivative. Most of the world hasn't — and the line between a financial instrument and a bet is drawn one country at a time. In Vietnam, three of the four doors are shut; this is the story of the one that's open — and of the listing engine, self-certification, that turns a license into a market in about a day, and the part of it Vietnam still has to build.
A prediction market is the same instrument everywhere. A contract pays $1 if an event happens and $0 if it doesn't, and it trades at whatever the crowd thinks the odds are — 62¢ means the market is saying 62%. The math doesn't change at a border. What changes is the rulebook the contract is read under, and that is decided one country at a time.
We've made the case before that this category is a derivative, not a wager, and mapped, region by region, who is likely to regulate it and who will ban it. This piece narrows the lens to one country — the one we know best, and the one where the answer is least obvious from the outside. Vietnam has no rule for prediction markets at all. It has, instead, four adjacent rulebooks, and the whole question of whether a licensed event-contract exchange can exist here comes down to which of the four it is read under.
Three of them are closed. One is open, and almost no one is looking at it.
The world hasn't agreed
Start with why the question is even open. The defining fact about prediction markets globally is that the same instrument is a regulated financial product in one jurisdiction and an illegal bet in the one next door — and that the deciding factor is rarely the instrument's design. It's which agency claims it.
The United States is the one country that has fully answered. There, event contracts are derivatives, and the derivatives regulator — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — owns them. Most of the rest of the world either routes them to a gambling regulator by default, restricts the underlying instrument outright, or has written nothing at all.
This is the whole opportunity and the whole risk in one table. Because the line is unsettled and drawn locally, the first credible operator to get on the right side of it in a given market tends to keep that market — exchanges are winner-take-most, and a license doesn't transfer across borders. So the question that decides everything in a new country is not is this legal? It's which regulator will claim it?
The regulator, not the label
The reason "gambling vs. finance" is the wrong frame is that it argues about a label when the law actually turns on an instrument. And the instrument is not ambiguous. A binary event contract is a digital option: its value derives from whether a real-world condition is met. Strip the venue away and the payoff is the cleanest derivative there is —
— a contract priced at its own probability. That is why, in the United States, the case never really hinged on whether prediction markets feel like betting. It hinged on a definition already sitting in the statute. The Commodity Exchange Act defines a "commodity" so broadly it reaches "all services, rights, and interests … in which contracts for future delivery are … dealt in," and it defines an "excluded commodity" to include an occurrence or contingency beyond the control of the parties, with an economic consequence.2 An event is a commodity. A contract on an event is a derivative. And a derivative lists on a licensed derivatives exchange — by self-certification, not by permission — subject to a short list of public-interest bars (the contract can't be on terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or activity that's unlawful).2
Kalshi is the proof that the chain holds under pressure. It spent three years building to the CFTC's standard, won a federal designation as a contract market in 2020, stood up its own clearinghouse, and then — when the regulator tried to block its election contracts — sued its own regulator and won.3 In 2026 a federal appeals court went further still — the first to hold that this federal regime preempts state gambling law for contracts listed on a licensed exchange, a question now working its way through other courts.3 The label "gambling" lost, in court, to the instrument "derivative." That is the precedent every other country now has sitting on the shelf.
None of this means the category is pure forecasting infrastructure today. Since sports contracts launched in mid-2024, sports has been roughly 80% of the volume on the largest U.S. exchange.1 The argument here is about the mechanism — a market-priced contract on a verifiable outcome — and where it's going (the hedging and data layer that institutions are now buying), not a claim that most of what trades today is civic information. Keep the two separate.
Compliance is a corporate structure
So why Kalshi, and not the dozen offshore books that came before it? The instrument is only half the answer. The other half is how you incorporate. Full compliance in this category isn't a single license — it's a set of separately registered entities, each doing exactly one regulated job, under one holding company.
The entity doing the heaviest regulatory lifting is the one in the middle. A clearing house — in the CFTC's language, a derivatives clearing organization — stands between every buyer and seller: it holds the margin, guarantees that winning trades get paid, walls customer money off from the company's own, and gives the regulator one supervised choke point over the whole market. Kalshi didn't rent that function. It built and federally registered its own, Kalshi Klear, so that every trade settles inside the regulated perimeter instead of on trust.3
Now the venue that didn't. Polymarket grew up offshore — its dominant exchange is operated out of Panama, beyond the CFTC's reach, with no U.S. license and no clearing house behind the trades; the platform admits as much in a disclaimer on its own site.10 When it moved to come onshore it had to buy a licensed exchange rather than become one — and even then it spent months unable to complete a full U.S. launch, chased state to state by cease-and-desist orders.10 The lesson isn't that Polymarket lacks ambition. It's that compliance is structural — it lives in how you are incorporated, cleared, and surveilled — and that is far harder to bolt on after the fact than to build in from day one.
- Onshore, in the United States
- A CFTC-licensed exchange (DCM)
- Its own clearing house (DCO)
- A real-time surveillance desk
- Tested in court — and won
- Dominant book offshore (Panama)
- No U.S. license on that book
- No clearing house behind the trades
- Retrofitting onshore by acquisition
- Full U.S. launch still incomplete
This is why the Kalshi route is the one worth copying — the proven-compliant shape, tested in court and built to be watched. And it is what makes Vietnam's new framework so striking: its commodity-exchange decree doesn't merely permit that shape, it requires it — an exchange, plus a clearing-house subsidiary, the exact split Kalshi runs.8 In Vietnam, a builder won't have to argue for the compliant structure. The law already mandates it.
Vietnam: three closed doors, one open
Now bring that lens to Vietnam. There is no event-contract rule here, so the model gets read under whichever existing regime fits closest. There are four candidates, and the difference between them is the difference between a business and a criminal referral.
The securities door is shut by monopoly. Vietnam regulates listed derivatives — futures and options — under its 2019 Securities Law, supervised by the State Securities Commission. But the law permits only the state-owned Vietnam Exchange and its subsidiaries to organize a trading market.4 There is no mechanism for a private company to be licensed as a derivatives exchange. And the recognized underlying assets are securities and securities indices; an election or a policy outcome isn't on the list. A private prediction-market exchange can't enter here, because no private exchange of any kind can.
The gambling door is shut by design. Vietnamese law treats betting as a tightly controlled, "not encouraged" activity, and it permits exactly three forms: horse racing, greyhound racing, and a pilot for international football.5 Crucially, the definition of betting is read by economic substance, not corporate form — it doesn't matter whether there's a bookmaker or an order book; what matters is whether participants stake money on an outcome. That is the regime an unstructured event-contract platform is most likely to fall into, and it carries real criminal exposure under the Penal Code.5 This is the live risk, and it deserves to be named plainly rather than waved away.
The crypto door doesn't fit. Vietnam opened a five-year pilot for crypto-asset services in 2025, and from January 2026 its Digital Technology Industry Law recognizes digital assets as lawful property.6 Promising — but not for this. The pilot caps licensed providers at five and routes them through the Ministry of Finance; more fundamentally, a crypto asset has to be a stand-alone asset backed by something real, and an event contract isn't one. It's a contract settling a payment on an outcome, which doesn't meet the definition of property under the Civil Code, so it isn't a "digital asset" the pilot can hold.6
The commodity door is open. This is the one the conversation from outside keeps walking past. Vietnam has a real, privately-operable commodity-exchange regime — the Mercantile Exchange of Vietnam already runs as a licensed commodity exchange — and its regulator is not the securities commission or the finance ministry but the Ministry of Industry and Trade.7 Of the four doors, it is the only one through which a private company can be licensed to operate an exchange at all. And it is the only regulator whose entire job is already commodity derivatives.
Here is the part that turns an open door into a thesis. In December 2025, Vietnam stood up an International Financial Center, and inside it issued a decree governing commodity exchanges.8 That decree does two things that matter enormously. First, it builds the exchange the way the U.S. builds one: an exchange plus a separate clearing-house subsidiary — the same split as a CFTC-designated contract market and its clearing organization. Second, it writes the list of what can trade as explicitly open: commodities permitted on the exchange "including but not limited to" agricultural products, energy, metals, carbon credits, and — the tell — cultural and artistic products represented as digital assets using NFT technology.8
Read that the way a regulator wrote it. The category of "commodity" in Vietnam's newest exchange framework was deliberately drafted to include intangible, digitally-represented assets, and was left open-ended on purpose. That is the same move the U.S. statute made decades ago — define the underlying broadly enough that the law doesn't have to be rewritten every time a new kind of contract appears.
Two rulebooks, the same shape
We just saw that Vietnam mandates the same corporate shape Kalshi runs. Widen the lens and the resemblance runs the whole length of the rulebook — the same kind of statute, the same kind of regulator, the same exchange-plus-clearing structure, the same deliberately open list of what can trade, almost line for line. Set the two side by side and only two things really differ: the height of the wall at the door, and one piece the Vietnamese side hasn't written yet.
Start with the wall. The Vietnamese decree sets a hard charter-capital floor — on the order of $80M across the exchange and its clearing subsidiary — where the U.S. scales capital to the size of the venue.8 For an investor that reads as a barrier; for an operator it reads as a moat. A market that costs nothing to enter is one anyone can enter. A licensed lane with an eight-figure wall, posted before a single contract trades, is one that very few will ever hold — which is exactly the property that makes the first licensed venue durable.
That leaves the second difference — the row marked not yet written — and it is the one that turns a structure into a working market. Holding the license is the cost of admission. What you actually do with it is list contracts, and the U.S. side of that row hides the single most important mechanism in the entire category: the licensed exchange lists by certifying its own compliance, in about a day, without asking anyone first. Vietnam has built the venue and left that lane blank. To see what it would have to fill in, we have to leave Vietnam for a moment and watch the engine run where it already does.
List by certification
Start with the assumption almost everyone brings, because it's wrong. People assume that to list a financial product, an exchange submits it to the regulator and waits for approval. For most of what trades on a U.S. derivatives exchange, that is not what happens. Under the same Commodity Exchange Act that makes an event contract a derivative, a licensed exchange — a Designated Contract Market, the DCM in that structure diagram — may list a new contract by filing a self-certification: a signed statement that the contract complies with the Act and the regulator's rules.12 No prior approval. The exchange certifies its own homework, and the contract goes live.
The timing is the part that surprises people. The rule requires only that the regulator receive the filing by the open of business on the business day before the contract lists.12 File today, trade tomorrow. There is a slower, voluntary path — an exchange can ask the regulator to formally approve a product, which starts a 45-day review clock that can be extended — but for event contracts almost nobody uses it, because the whole advantage of the category is being able to put a market on tonight's question up before tonight.12
This looks like a loophole. It isn't. It's a bargain, and the bargain is the whole point of being licensed. A DCM is a self-regulatory organization: in exchange for the right to list products itself, it takes on the legal duty to police its own market — to list only contracts "not readily susceptible to manipulation," to surveil trading, to keep records the regulator can pull at any time.13 Self-certification is the exchange internalizing the regulator's judgment and signing its name under it. Speed is what you get for becoming a credible regulator of yourself. That is why it's a privilege of the licensed — and, as we'll see, not a thing an offshore book can simply choose to do.
The veto the regulator keeps
Filing your own certificate is not the same as the regulator looking away. The certificate is a promise, and the regulator can call it in. For one specific category — event contracts — the Act writes that power down explicitly, in the very same public-interest list we met earlier. A contract may be barred if the regulator finds it "contrary to the public interest," and the statute names the cases where it can: a contract that involves activity unlawful under any state or federal law, or that involves terrorism, assassination, war, or gaming — plus a catch-all for "other similar activity" the regulator defines by rule.13
So the real shape of self-certification is an asymmetry. The exchange controls the speed of going live; the regulator keeps the power to undo it — to open a 90-day review, demand the market be suspended while it looks, and at the end approve the contract or prohibit it outright.13 Even short of that, it can stay a self-certified listing the moment it suspects the certificate was false, or petition to rewrite the contract's terms — a reminder, issued to every exchange in a March 2026 advisory, that the certificate is a promise the regulator can always call in.13 Listing speed is not the same as regulatory finality. And the single most contested word in that list of bars — gaming — is exactly the one the regulator was arguing about the week this published: on June 10, it proposed to draw, contract by contract, where the public-interest line falls for sports, with a market on a final score or a season-long record likely allowed and a market on a single play, an injury, or an officiating call likely not.14 A proposal, not a settled rule — and it follows a full reversal, from a 2023 order branding these contracts "gaming" to a 2026 advisory calling them a financial asset class. The mechanism is stable. The line inside it is still being drawn.
One template, a thousand markets
To see the engine run, watch the venue that built itself around it — the same Kalshi whose corporate structure we diagrammed above. What it does with the one-day rule is the part worth studying. Kalshi rarely self-certifies a single market. It self-certifies a template — a contract with the specifics left as blanks, like Will <team> win <title>? — and then fills in the blanks to spin up concrete markets without filing again for each one.15 One certification becomes a category; a category becomes hundreds of live questions. The company has said outright that it certifies more markets than it ever bothers to list.15 That leverage now carries a caveat the regulator wrote down in March 2026: its market-oversight staff cautioned that an overly broad template — one that waves at many different underlying events, or settles on a source still to be named — can fail the very manipulation test the certificate is supposed to vouch for, and told exchanges to pin down a reliable settlement source for each permutation up front.15
That scale is also what made Kalshi the test case for the regulator's veto — the fight the earlier sections referenced but didn't trace. In 2023 it self-certified contracts on which party would control Congress. The regulator opened the public-interest review, then issued an order disapproving them — the contracts, it argued, involved gaming and activity unlawful under state law, and were contrary to the public interest.16 Kalshi sued. In 2024 a federal court vacated the order, holding that an election is not a "game" in the ordinary sense of the word; the contracts went live and traded through the November election, and in 2025 the agency dropped its appeal and let the ruling stand.16 The veto fired, and lost.
The fight has since moved one level out — and this is the same preemption ruling the opening sections flagged. Kalshi self-certified sports contracts in early 2025, and this time the pushback came less from the federal regulator than from state gambling commissions, which sent cease-and-desist letters arguing these were unlicensed sportsbooks. In 2026 a federal appeals court sided with Kalshi — the first to hold that the federal commodity law preempts state gambling law for contracts on a licensed exchange — though it ruled only at a preliminary stage, and parallel cases in other circuits had not yet been decided.17 The argument is no longer "may the exchange list it." It's "may a state stop what the exchange has already self-certified." That is a measure of how much ground self-certification quietly won.
Who gets to certify
If self-certification is a privilege of the licensed, then the license is the whole story of who can do it — which is where the offshore contrast from earlier turns concrete. We already saw why Polymarket had to buy its way onshore rather than build; the listing mechanism is where that bites. Its offshore book doesn't self-certify contracts at all, because there is no regulator it is certifying to — it lists what it likes, outside the system, and blocks U.S. users at the door. That is precisely why it couldn't self-certify its way in: when it finally came onshore in 2025 it had to pay roughly $112M for a company that already held the licenses, and a year on, the U.S. relaunch was still rolling out behind invitations and a single app.18
That is the deeper reason the license is the moat. Two pieces make a venue able to self-certify and stand behind what it lists: the exchange itself (the DCM, which lists and matches) and a clearing house (the derivatives clearing organization, or DCO, which holds the margin and guarantees settlement). The venues that own both are vertically integrated and answer to no outside clearer about which contracts they're willing to back. The ones that own only the exchange rent their clearing — which is leverage someone else holds.
The field is filling in fast — Interactive Brokers' ForecastEx, Crypto.com's Nadex, CME, DraftKings, Underdog — and the split runs cleanly along that line. Kalshi, Polymarket's U.S. entity, ForecastEx, Nadex, CME, and Underdog's exchange own both halves.19 Coinbase's derivatives exchange and DraftKings' both list contracts but clear through someone else's house.19 All of them, to put a market up, do the same thing Kalshi does: file a certificate and wait one day. The offshore book is the only one in the picture that can't — and that single fact is why it had to spend nine figures to buy its way to a thing a license grants for free.
What one listing actually involves
Step inside a single contract, because "self-certify a template" hides real work. Listing one event contract — done properly, the way a regulator can later defend — runs through five steps, and only the fourth is fast.
The hard part is hiding in step one, in the word source. Every event contract needs a settlement rule — a pre-named, public, hard-to-game authority that decides yes or no when it expires. A market on a Fed decision settles on the Fed's own statement; a market on a game settles on the final score. Pick a flimsy source and the contract fails the manipulation standard in step two and shouldn't be certified at all. This is what we've called the resolution bottleneck: the easy half is the price, and who decides what's true is the rest. Self-certification doesn't remove that judgment — it puts the exchange's own name under it. The certificate is, in the end, a promise about step one.
That is the engine, and it is worth holding the whole shape in mind before we carry it back to Vietnam. A licensed exchange lists by certifying its own compliance, in about a day; the regulator keeps a veto it can fire and, in the one case it tried, lost; the privilege belongs only to a venue that holds both the exchange and the clearing house; and underneath the speed sits real work — defining a contract and naming a settlement source a regulator can trust. The whole machine is what a license buys. Which brings us back to the one row in our side-by-side that Vietnam has left blank.
The bridge that isn't built yet
Now the honest part, because the case falls apart if you skip it. Today, an event outcome is not a listed commodity in Vietnam — and, just as importantly, the decree builds the venue but does not yet define a self-certification lane for novel contracts. There is no Rule 40.2 here, no one-day filing, no codified veto-and-review for the regulator to keep in reserve. The open-ended list and the NFT precedent show the category was built to expand, but nobody has yet listed a contract on an election or a policy decision, and until someone does — under explicit supervision — the gambling-classification risk named earlier is live and real. This is a thesis with a mechanism, not a settled fact.
What makes it a mechanism and not a hope is that the gap is narrow and every plank across it already has an analog in the framework — which is exactly what the side-by-side showed. The commodity list is already open and already reaches intangible, digitally-represented assets. The clearing subsidiary that would have to stand behind a contract is already mandated. The regulator is the one that already supervises commodity derivatives, so the conceptual leap — from a contract on the price of steel to a contract on a verifiable outcome — sits inside its existing competence, not outside it. What is genuinely missing is the listing lane itself: a defined process by which the exchange proposes a contract, the regulator supervises it, and the clearing subsidiary backs it. That is a thing a regulator grants, not a thing a builder can will into being — and it is the single deliverable that turns the open door into a working market. And it is worth saying lightly that Vietnam's domestic commodity-trading rules still rest on a 2005 commercial statute, while this modern financial-center decree is the newer template; when a country runs an old regime and a new one in parallel, the new one is usually the direction of travel.7 The point isn't to predict a specific amendment. It's that the surface a builder has to work with here is unusually pliable.
The same lens travels across Asia, and it is the practical payoff of the whole "which regulator, not is-it-legal" frame. Most of the region routes an event contract to a gambling regulator by default, where the answer is no. The places where this can be built are the ones with a commodity-derivatives authority that could plausibly hold the instrument — which is why the boring, structural question, which regulator already owns derivatives here, predicts more than any headline about whether prediction markets are "allowed."
How you actually get there
So what does a path look like, in practice, for someone trying to operate inside the rules rather than around them? It is a ladder, not a leap — and the rungs are the same ones Vietnam itself has been building.
The near-term rung is a sandbox, and it is also where the missing listing lane gets written for the first time. Vietnam has built controlled-testing regimes precisely for models the law hasn't caught up with — Da Nang's city sandbox is operating now,9 and the financial center carries its own pilot mechanism. A sandbox is the right venue for a first event-contract market because it reframes the question the regulator is being asked: not "approve a permanent gambling-adjacent product" but "supervise one limited, risk-controlled test of a financial contract." A single, surveilled, participation-limited market is a far more answerable request than a permanent product — and approving it is, in practice, the regulator drafting the first version of the very listing process the decree left blank: who proposes the contract, how it is supervised, how the clearing subsidiary stands behind it. Presented as financial risk-transfer under supervision — with strict participation limits, real surveillance, and clean resolution — it generates both the proof-of-concept and the procedural template that any later licensing conversation needs.
The destination rung is the commodity-derivative license itself — the $80M lane, built the way Kalshi built: an exchange with a clearing-house subsidiary, a surveillance desk, and a rulebook a regulator can read. Between the two, the work is regulatory engagement: a category this new advances less by clever legal argument than by a regulator deciding it wants the category, legibly supervised, inside its own house rather than offshore and out of view.
Why the door is worth walking through
The last question is whether being first is worth the trouble, and the honest answer is that in this category, being first is most of the prize. The offshore alternative is closing, not opening: as we saw, even after buying a license the largest offshore book still couldn't complete a clean U.S. launch.10 When a market goes onshore, the licensed venue takes it — Korea banned offshore crypto exchanges in 2017 and the licensed local exchange has held 80%+ of the market ever since.11 The license isn't a cost of doing business. In a winner-take-most category, the license is the business.
That is the shape of the opportunity in Vietnam, and the reason it's worth writing down while it's still unobvious. Three of the four doors are shut — securities by monopoly, gambling by design, crypto by definition. The fourth, the commodity-exchange door, is open, privately licensable, run by a commodity-derivatives regulator, and attached to a brand-new framework whose list of tradable things was deliberately left open and already includes intangible digital assets. None of that guarantees an event-contract exchange tomorrow. It does mean that the country has, almost quietly, built the one rulebook under which such a thing could plausibly be read as what it actually is — a derivative — rather than what it superficially resembles. And the engine that makes a license worth holding — self-certification, the power to put tonight's question up before tonight — is exactly the machinery the first builder gets to help write here, one supervised pilot at a time.
Seeker's work is in that gap. We'll say plainly what we always do: there is no licensed exchange live; the license is the goal, not a fact, and the bridge across this door isn't built yet. What we believe is narrower and, we think, more defensible: every country will eventually draw this line; the line will run through whichever regulator already owns the instrument; in Vietnam that points at one door; and the venue that walks through it with the full machinery — exchange, clearing, surveillance, clean resolution, and a certificate it can stand behind — is the one that gets to list first, and to be read as finance rather than as a bet. The door is open. Someone is going to walk through it.
- Cross-jurisdiction treatment of event contracts is summarized in Seeker Labs, "The global license map" (2026). Category context: combined monthly volume rose from <$100M/mo (early 2024) toward the multi-billion range by end-2025 (Bernstein; Pew). Sports has been ~80% of the largest U.S. exchange's volume since sports contracts launched (mid-2024); reported by The Block.
- Commodity Exchange Act, 7 U.S.C. § 1a(9) ("commodity," incl. "all services, rights, and interests … in which contracts for future delivery are … dealt in"); § 1a(19) ("excluded commodity," incl. an occurrence/contingency beyond the parties' control with an economic consequence); § 7a-2(c) (self-certification of new contracts by registered entities; "5c(c)"); § 7a-2(c)(5)(C) (special rule for event contracts — public-interest bars: activity unlawful under any law, terrorism, assassination, war, gaming); § 2(a)(1) (CFTC exclusive jurisdiction). Cornell Legal Information Institute.
- CFTC designated KalshiEX LLC a contract market (DCM) in Nov 2020; Kalshi Klear LLC registered as a derivatives clearing organization (DCO) in Aug 2024 (CFTC press releases). KalshiEX LLC v. CFTC (D.D.C. 2024) — court vacated the CFTC's order blocking congressional-control contracts; the D.C. Circuit denied a stay and the contracts went live. Kalshi v. New Jersey (3d Cir., Apr 2026) — first federal appellate ruling that the CEA preempts state gambling law for event contracts on a CFTC-registered exchange.
- Law on Securities (No. 54/2019/QH14); Decree 158/2020/NĐ-CP on derivatives and the derivatives market. Only the state-owned Vietnam Exchange (VNX) and its subsidiaries may organize a securities/derivatives trading market; supervision by the State Securities Commission under the Ministry of Finance.
- Decree 06/2017/NĐ-CP on betting business (horse racing, greyhound racing, and a pilot for international football). Gambling/betting is assessed by economic substance, not corporate form. Criminal exposure: Penal Code (No. 100/2015/QH13, as amended), arts. 321–322.
- Resolution 05/2025/NQ-CP — pilot framework for the crypto-asset market (effective 9 Sep 2025; licensed providers capped, routed via the Ministry of Finance; crypto assets must be backed by real-world assets, excluding securities and fiat). Law on Digital Technology Industry (No. 71/2025/QH15, in force 1 Jan 2026) — recognizes digital assets as lawful property within the meaning of the Civil Code. An event contract settles a payment on an outcome and does not meet the Civil Code's definition of an asset, so it is not a "digital asset" under the pilot.
- The Mercantile Exchange of Vietnam operates as a licensed commodity exchange; the establishment and operation of a commodity exchange must meet statutory conditions and be approved by the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Domestic regime: Commercial Law (No. 36/2005/QH11) and its implementing decree on goods trading through Commodity Exchanges (Decree 158/2006/NĐ-CP, as amended by Decree 51/2018/NĐ-CP).
- Resolution 222/2025/QH15 of the National Assembly on the International Financial Center in Vietnam (June 2025); implementing decrees issued December 2025, including the decree on the establishment and operation of the Commodity Exchange within the Center (Decree 330/2025/NĐ-CP), proposed by the Ministry of Industry and Trade. The decree mandates an exchange plus a clearing-house subsidiary, sets minimum charter capital for the exchange (VND 1,500 billion) and the clearing house (VND 500 billion) — on the order of $80M combined — caps foreign ownership at 49%, and permits commodities "including but not limited to" agricultural products, energy, industrial raw materials, metals (excluding gold), carbon credits, and cultural/artistic products represented as digital assets using NFT technology.
- Da Nang operates a city-level controlled-testing (sandbox) mechanism for new technologies, products, services, and business models not yet addressed by law; the VIFC framework carries its own controlled-pilot mechanism for technology-enabled financial models. (Da Nang sandbox: Resolution 259 and related implementing resolutions.)
- Polymarket's dominant book is operated offshore — out of Panama, outside CFTC oversight and with no clearing house behind the trades — as the platform states in a disclaimer on its own site. It acquired a CFTC-licensed exchange (QCEX) to come onshore but, months on, had not completed a full U.S. retail launch: invite-only for half a year, limited platform availability, and pursued state to state by cease-and-desist orders and injunctions. See Seeker Labs, "The market knew" (2026), and contemporaneous reporting.
- South Korea barred offshore crypto exchanges in 2017; the licensed domestic exchange (Upbit) has held 80%+ of the market since. A natural experiment for what happens when a market goes onshore — discussed in Seeker Labs, "Winner-takes-most" (2026).
- Self-certification authority: Commodity Exchange Act §5c(c), 7 U.S.C. § 7a-2(c). Listing products by certification: 17 C.F.R. § 40.2 — the Commission must receive the submission "by the open of business on the business day preceding" the product's listing, with a certification that the product complies with the Act and Commission regulations plus a concise explanation and analysis. Voluntary approval: 17 C.F.R. § 40.3 — a 45-day review period, extendable by up to 45 more days or by agreement. Rule self-certification (10 business days): 17 C.F.R. § 40.6. Cornell Legal Information Institute / eCFR.
- Event-contract "special rule": CEA §5c(c)(5)(C), 7 U.S.C. § 7a-2(c)(5)(C) — the Commission may find a contract "contrary to the public interest" if it involves activity unlawful under any federal or state law, terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or "other similar activity" determined by rule; such a contract "may [not] be listed or made available for clearing or trading." Implemented at 17 C.F.R. § 40.11, which provides for a 90-day review and a request to suspend listing/trading during the review. DCM listing standard ("not readily susceptible to manipulation"): CEA Core Principle 3, 7 U.S.C. § 7(d)(3); 17 C.F.R. Part 38. The Commission also retains authority to stay a self-certified listing pending proceedings for a false certification, or a petition under CEA §8a(7) to alter or amend a contract's terms — reaffirmed in CFTC Letter 26-08, DMO "Prediction Markets Advisory" (Mar. 12, 2026).
- CFTC, "Event Contracts Involving Enumerated Activities," notice of proposed rulemaking (Press Release 9249-26, June 10, 2026) — proposes to amend Regulation 40.11 and add an Appendix F, codifying a contract-by-contract public-interest framework and a 90-day review; takes the position that sports contracts on final scores, win/loss, and season-long metrics may be permissible, while contracts on a single play, injuries, or officiating decisions are more likely contrary to the public interest. A proposal, not a final rule. It follows the February 2026 withdrawal of the May-2024 event-contracts proposal and a March 2026 advance notice, under Chairman Michael Selig. Federal Register / cftc.gov; contemporaneous reporting (Axios, ESPN).
- Kalshi lists by self-certification under Rule 40.2, typically the next business day, using templated contracts with variable placeholders (e.g. "Will <team> win <title>?", filed Jan 22, 2025, listed Jan 23, 2025 — CFTC Part 40 product filing); the company has stated it certifies markets it does not ultimately list. Several thousand live markets as of early 2026. A March 2026 DMO staff advisory (CFTC Letter 26-08, "Prediction Markets Advisory") cautioned that overly broad templates with many permutations, or settlement on "yet-to-be-determined" sources, may not satisfy the Core Principle 3 "not readily susceptible to manipulation" standard, and urged exchanges to specify a reliable settlement source for each permutation.
- Kalshi self-certified congressional-control contracts in 2023; the CFTC opened a Regulation 40.11 review and then issued an Order of Disapproval (Sept 2023), arguing the contracts involved "gaming" and activity unlawful under state law and were contrary to the public interest. KalshiEX LLC v. CFTC (D.D.C. 2024) vacated the order, holding that an election is not "gaming"; the D.C. Circuit declined to stay the ruling and the contracts went live and traded through the November 2024 election. The CFTC dismissed its appeal in May 2025, leaving the ruling intact. CFTC press releases; court opinions; contemporaneous reporting.
- Kalshi self-certified sports event contracts in early 2025; multiple state gaming regulators issued cease-and-desist orders. KalshiEX LLC v. Flaherty (3d Cir., Apr 6, 2026, 2–1) — the first federal appellate ruling that the Commodity Exchange Act preempts state gambling law for sports event contracts on a CFTC-registered exchange, decided at the preliminary-injunction stage. Parallel appeals in the Ninth and Fourth Circuits had been argued but not decided as of mid-2026. Law-firm analyses (Holland & Knight, Skadden); CoinDesk.
- To come onshore Polymarket acquired QCEX — QCX LLC, a CFTC-designated DCM, and QC Clearing LLC, a registered DCO — for roughly $112M (closed July 2025); the CFTC granted narrow no-action relief in September 2025. A 2022 CFTC settlement ($1.4M) had earlier required its offshore book to wind down U.S.-facing markets. As of mid-2026 the U.S. relaunch remained limited (invite-only into 2026; initially a single mobile platform). See Seeker Labs, "The market knew" (2026), and contemporaneous reporting.
- CFTC Designated Contract Market and Derivatives Clearing Organization registries. Vertically integrated (own both exchange and clearing): KalshiEX + Kalshi Klear; QCX + QC Clearing (Polymarket US); ForecastEx LLC (Interactive Brokers; one entity holds both, "Forecast Contracts" via ForecastTrader, 2024); Nadex (Crypto.com/Foris; self-clears); CME + CME Clearing (event-contract product; "FanDuel Predicts," Dec 2025); Aristotle Exchange DCM + DCO (acquired by Underdog, 2026). Exchange-only, clearing through a third party: Coinbase Derivatives (clears via Nodal Clear); Railbird Exchange (acquired by DraftKings; clears via Bitnomial). Registration dates per the CFTC registries.