CFTC commissioner blasts the regulator’s handling of prediction markets

5/30/24 4:54PM

Commissioner Summer Mersinger of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission has a bone to pick — with the CFTC.

The Biden-nominated official took the stage Thursday at the Consensus crypto conference in Austin, Texas, and lambasted her own agency’s stance on prediction markets.

“I think we are taking a very dangerous approach to regulating these,” explained Mersinger. “I worry that this could end in a lot of litigation.”

Earlier this month, the CFTC proposed new rules that would ban so-called “events contracts” dealing with certain real-world events, like US election outcomes and sports games. Those events contracts are the bread and butter of many prediction markets, like the crypto-based Polymarket, which allows traders to place bets on a wide range of topics.

“To me, then you’re just driving all of this offshore, which is more concerning when you’re talking about US investors who do want to participate in these markets,” said Mersinger. “I was frustrated with our rulemaking.”

Would-be bettors in the US may be frustrated as well. According to Polymarket, which doesn’t allow US persons to place bets on its site, more than $141M has been wagered on the upcoming US presidential election alone. PredictIt, which is based in New Zealand, likewise has a thriving events contract on the outcome of this fall’s US presidential election.

“Congress gave us the authority to regulate these markets, so at the end of the day these are legal markets,” emphasized Mersinger. “And I think I have to repeat that a lot in the agency.”

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Ripple launches treasury platform to manage cash and cryptocurrencies

Ripple, the firm closely tied to the fifth-largest cryptocurrency, XRP, introduced a new treasury platform for digital asset and traditional cash management for users like financial officers, treasurers, and accountants.

Ripple’s move comes more than three months after it acquired treasury software provider GTreasury for $1 billion, one of several steps to grow the firm’s position in corporate finance.

Combining Ripple’s blockchain rails and GTreasury’s software, the new platform’s goal is to simplify treasury operations. It eliminates settlement delays with payment times of three to five seconds and optimizes yield from working capital 24/7 through tokenized money market funds such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and overnight secure repo markets with RLUSD, according to a Tuesday blog post.

Ripple Treasury also aims to provide “real-time cash positions, automated forecasting, and seamless reporting across traditional cash, digital assets, RLUSD, and XRP holdings,” the blog post stated.

Last year, Ripple filed its national banking license application with the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, while the firm’s subsidiary Standard Custody & Trust Company applied for a Federal Reserve master account, which would allow Ripple to hold RLUSD reserves directly with the Fed.

XRP has seen $2.4 billion in trading volume in the last 24 hours, increasing 1.8% in the period. The token’s all-time high was set in July 2025 at $3.65. Meanwhile, spot XRP ETFs had nearly $9.2 million worth of inflows on Tuesday, bringing cumulative inflows to $1.4 billion.

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US-CRYPTOCURRENCY-CLIMATE-EMPLOYMENT-CHINA

$82B

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Crypto money laundering activity totaled more than $82 billion in 2025, more than 8x higher than 2020’s figure of $10 billion, according to a Tuesday report published by crypto analytics firm Chainalysis. Chinese-language networks dominated the ecosystem, accounting for roughly 20% of the illicit activity, or $16.1 billion, last year:

“Compared to other laundering endpoints, since 2020, inflows to identified CMLNs [Chinese-langugage money laundering networks] grew 7,325 times faster than those to centralized exchanges, 1,810 times faster than those to decentralized finance (DeFi), and 2,190 times faster than intra-illicit on-chain flows.”

Tom Keatinge, director at the Centre for Finance & Security at security think tank Royal United Services Institute, told Chainalysis that the rapid development of Chinese-language networks is an “an unforeseen consequence” of China’s imposition of capital controls.

“Wealthy individuals seeking to move money out of China and evade these controls provide the impetus and liquidity pool needed to service organized crime groups based in the West,” he noted.

Keatinge told Chainalysis, “The professional enablers of this capital flight provide the services necessary to match these two independent yet mutually beneficial needs.”

Chinese-language networks offer six primary money movement techniques to clean dirty money, which include recruiting individuals to rent out their financial identities, selling illicit cryptocurrency at a discounted rate, and obscuring fund origins through multiple transactions.

Overall, this Chinese ecosystem processed nearly $44 million per day last year.

CFTC commissioner blasts the regulator’s handling of prediction markets

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