According to an article in the Washington Post, PredictIt, a futures exchange based in the U.S. tied to political events, has until February 15 to close all existing markets and shut down.

From the article:

PredictIt was always a bit of a legal anomaly. Generally, the United States outlaws betting on political outcomes, but there can be an exception noncommercial purposes. PredictIt operates under limitations: bets are capped at $850 limits, and there can be no more than 5,000 people at a time in any given market; they cannot offer contracts on sports, or on when people will die or whether they will get kidnapped.

Its founder, John Aristotle Phillips, created the site in 2014 as part of a collaboration with Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, which had created a futures exchange tied to political events. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates markets, issued Victoria what’s known as a “no-action letter,” which said it could have the exchange as long as it was an “academic exercise” and that the university wouldn’t profit from it.

But the agency now has signaled a change of heart. It said PredictIt could no longer offer new markets, and that all existing ones would have to close by February 15. “They grew to a point where they violated the terms of the letter,” Steve Adamske, a spokesman for the agency, told The Washington Post.

Phillips has filed a lawsuit arguing that the CFTC’s move to shut down the company was “arbitrary and capricious” and that CFTC offered no rationale for why this is happening now.
Read the entire article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...g-on-politics/