Polymarket seeks to return to the U.S. market, with U.S. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig as a key decision-maker

BlockBeats News, April 29 — The prediction market platform Polymarket has entered negotiations with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regarding lifting its four-year ban, seeking to reopen its mainnet trading platform based on the Polygon blockchain, with USDC settlement, for U.S. users.

In 2022, Polymarket’s parent company Blockratize was fined $1.4 million by the CFTC for operating an unregistered platform, and was forced to ban U.S. users. What’s special about this round of return-to-negotiations is that among the five CFTC commissioners, only Chair Michael Selig is currently in office, meaning this major decision will be made solely by him.

Selig has continued to publicly back prediction markets over the past year—he posted in February warning that he would sue state governments attempting to interfere with regulation, issued compliance guidance and publicly solicited industry input in March, and this month said that if prediction markets are pushed offshore, it would repeat the FTX-style collapse.

But the “single-person decision” itself is drawing criticism. Analysts warn that moving ahead in the absence of consensus within the commission will plant the risk of policy reversals—once the vacant seats are filled, the new commission can overturn any decisions that Selig signed alone at any time.

If ultimately approved, Polymarket’s mainnet trading platform will become the first crypto-native platform to be included in the U.S. federal derivatives regulatory framework, while also putting an end to the gray area in which users previously used VPNs to bypass the ban. Currently, neither Polymarket nor the CFTC has responded to this matter.