How Every Major US Prediction-Market Operator Is Licensed

Kalshi remains the template: a Designated Contract Market approved in November 2020, built from a de novo application rather than an acquisition. ForecastEx, an Interactive Brokers affiliate, followed the same path in 2024, deliberately sticking to economic and climate contracts to stay out of the sports and election controversies that have followed Kalshi.

Aristotle Exchange took the same de novo route in September 2025, giving PredictIt's operator a regulated successor to its contested no-action letter. Gemini Titan's DCM designation, granted in December 2025, took roughly five years from its original 2020 application, the longest review among current operators, spanning multiple CFTC leadership changes.

Polymarket, DraftKings, and Fanatics all reached DCM status by buying an existing registrant rather than filing their own applications. Polymarket's $112 million acquisition of QCX LLC in 2025 gave it an Amended Order of Designation within months, compared to the multi-year timeline a from-scratch filing would likely have required.

DraftKings acquired Railbird Exchange in October 2025 and rebranded it as DraftKings Prediction, later launching its own proprietary exchange, DKeX, in June 2026. Fanatics announced its own acquisition of Water Street Labs and CX Clearinghouse from BGC Group in July 2026, following the same logic: buy the regulatory shell, then build the product on top of it.

PredictIt is the clearest case of an operator whose legal footing rests on relief rather than registration. It has operated since 2014 under a no-action letter originally issued for academic research purposes, a status the CFTC unsuccessfully tried to withdraw in 2022 before the Fifth Circuit intervened.

Crypto.com Derivatives North America holds the industry's longest-running DCM designation by pedigree, originally issued to HedgeStreet in 2004 and passed through a series of ownership changes, most recently Crypto.com's 2022 acquisition. Despite the age of its license, the venue faces the same wave of state cease-and-desist orders as its newer competitors whenever it lists sports contracts.

Robinhood Derivatives began as a distributor of Kalshi-listed contracts before completing its own path to a CFTC-licensed venue through Rothera, a joint venture with Susquehanna and MIAX that closed in January 2026 and operates under the MIAXdx DCM designation. As of its second-quarter 2026 earnings, Robinhood still routed roughly 60 percent of its weekly prediction-market volume through Kalshi even after Rothera's launch.

Kinetic Markets (Kalshi's FCM affiliate) and Polymarket's PM Derivatives filing show a parallel trend: operators adding an FCM registration on top of an existing DCM relationship specifically to offer margin trading, rather than to gain a new venue to list contracts on.

Charles Schwab and Cboe Global Markets have taken a structurally distinct approach, routing prediction-style products through the Cboe Options Exchange under SEC regulation and OCC clearing rather than seeking any CFTC DCM designation. Cboe launched its first Cboe Predicts contracts, S&P 500 binary options, on Interactive Brokers in June 2026, with Schwab distribution still pending as of early August.

By limiting its contracts to financial-index outcomes and explicitly avoiding sports, politics, and entertainment, the Schwab-Cboe pairing sidesteps both CFTC DCM registration and the state gambling-law exposure that has produced dozens of cease-and-desist orders against Kalshi, Polymarket, Robinhood, and Crypto.com.

Hyperliquid's HIP-4 protocol, activated on mainnet in May 2026, operates entirely outside the CFTC's registration framework as a decentralized, on-chain venue. It is accessible to US residents through workarounds such as VPNs rather than through any domestic license, a structure that creates real regulatory-arbitrage risk even as its policy arm has begun engaging the CFTC's own rulemaking process to argue for exclusive federal jurisdiction.

Comparing the six structures side by side (de novo DCM, acquired DCM, no-action letter, FCM-layered intermediation, SEC/OCC side door, and unregulated on-chain) makes clear that 'is this operator regulated' is rarely a yes-or-no question in this market. It depends on which product line, which entity in a corporate family, and which regulator's framework is being asked about.