Native American tribes urged the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission not to place sports-related prediction contracts under swap jurisdiction, as the agencies weigh how to redraw the line around a swap. The tribes said that treating those contracts as swaps would push sports wagering-style activity into a federal trading framework rather than the system already governing gaming on tribal lands.
As covered in July, tribal gaming leaders had already warned that prediction markets were testing state and tribal authority. In the new filing, the tribes said the change would pull business away from tribal gaming, interfere with what they called a vital source of funding, and create a regulatory path that bypasses the existing framework for gaming on tribal lands.
The tribes also said the proposal would violate the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Their view was that sports betting contracts belong within gaming regulation, not in a swap definition being stretched to cover them.
The comments came as the SEC and CFTC sought public input on how to draw clearer regulatory lines for innovative products that may implicate both agencies. A June 24 Federal Register notice asked for comment on possible approaches to define swap and security-based swap more clearly, along with alternative compliance, and set an Aug. 24 deadline for responses.
The CFTC had separately proposed on June 10 a framework for event contracts involving activities listed in the Commodity Exchange Act, including gaming and conduct unlawful under federal or state law. That proposal described a 90-day review process and public-interest factors to be applied contract by contract.
In the June 12 Federal Register notice, the agency said prediction markets were growing quickly, with more than $25 billion of trading volume on CFTC-registered platforms in 2025. It also said the wider CFTC-regulated futures market had a notional value of around $31 trillion that year, leaving prediction markets as a small share of the whole.
