Kalshi's new employment verification and risk scoring arrived the same day the CFTC opened its first federal rulemaking for the sector. Both tracks are building the integrity layer the prediction market industry never had.
Prediction markets have spent the last two years in the headlines for the wrong reasons: insider-trading arrests tied to military operations, probes into whether trading on unreleased corporate data counts as fraud, and a series of cases that have made the sector feel less like a new asset class and more like a new venue for old crimes. On June 10, 2026, two different attempts to fix that problem landed on the same day. One came from Kalshi, the largest federally regulated exchange, in the form of a self-imposed package of integrity measures. The other came from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in the form of the first federal rulemaking the prediction-market industry has ever seen.
The pairing is the story. Until now, prediction markets have grown faster than the systems meant to police them. Kalshi's announcement, reported by The Verge and detailed in a company post from Kalshi, bundles three concrete changes: a framework that scores each market for manipulation and insider risk, employment verification for users trading on the markets that score highest, and a new whistleblower reporting channel. The risk-scoring system uses six categories, including corporate KPI and events risk, outcome concentration risk, market importance, regulatory risk, non-traditional insider risk, and national security risk. The point of the employment check, Kalshi says, is to identify and screen out "presumptive insiders" before they can place a trade.
Whether the package is enough depends on how much weight a reader puts on a self-imposed regime. The new measures follow the first report of Kalshi's Surveillance Audit Committee, a body the company describes as "independent." The committee interviewed Kalshi staff, reviewed policies and algorithms, and will deliver quarterly reports. The committee was commissioned by Kalshi and its members are appointed by Kalshi, so the "independent" label reflects the company's framing of the arrangement, not a structural firewall. The integrity floor Kalshi is building is, in the literal sense, a floor the company is laying for itself. Kalshi's Q1 enforcement numbers travel alongside the announcement: more than 150 investigations, more than 100 potential insider trades blocked by new screening tools, more than 20 referrals to law enforcement, and 5 disciplinary actions, per Robert DeNault, Kalshi's head of enforcement. Those figures are Kalshi-self-reported and not independently audited in the public record. The post does not specify the thresholds that flag a market for employment verification, what employment data is collected or retained, or the legal basis on which Kalshi prescreens and blocks trades before they occur.
The same day Kalshi posted its package, the CFTC took a different approach. In Press Release 9249-26, the agency opened a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would amend Regulation 40.11 and add an Appendix F to Part 40, with a 90-day public comment window. The proposal introduces a multi-factor public-interest test anchored in Section 5c(c)(5)(C) of the Commodity Exchange Act, a statute that lets the agency block contracts involving terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or other conduct unlawful under federal or state law. Chairman Michael S. Selig attached a statement to the release. The CFTC, according to CoinDesk, is currently running as a sole-Chairman agency, with four commissioner seats vacant and no White House nominations pending, and the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is still working its way through the Senate. That institutional thinness does not change the substance of the NPRM, but it is part of the context for what the rulemaking can and cannot do on the timeline Kalshi and other exchanges are operating on.
The two tracks also differ on what they choose to disclose. Kalshi's public materials list the new measures and the Q1 enforcement numbers the company wants associated with them. The CFTC's NPRM names the statutory hook and the multi-factor test on the record, and asks the public to comment before the rule is finalized. The federal track is a rulemaking in progress, with no binding contract market standards yet. The industry track is a series of company-level controls that Kalshi can adjust, and that competitors can match or ignore. Neither replaces the other, and neither closes the insider-trading cases that have already been filed.
What the day delivered was a clear sign that the sector has reached the size where the integrity plumbing is no longer optional. Federal rulemaking is in motion, and Kalshi is putting its own controls in place while the comment period runs. The two tracks will not converge on the same answer, but they will be running in parallel for the first time.
The next marker to watch is the public comment on the CFTC's NPRM. If the rule lands close to its current form, prediction markets will have a federal standard for the first time, and Kalshi's self-imposed package will look less like a leading move and more like a baseline. If the proposal is diluted or withdrawn, the company-level controls become the only game in town, with all the limits that implies.