Hyperliquid Policy Center writes to the CFTC: A compliance pathway should be opened for decentralized prediction markets

The Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) announced that it has formally submitted a comment letter regarding the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on prediction markets, advocating for the establishment of a clear compliance path for decentralized prediction markets based on public, permissionless blockchains while improving the regulatory framework for centralized prediction markets.

In the comment letter, HPC calls on the CFTC to develop more flexible, function-oriented rules to accommodate decentralized market structures; to establish clear legal channels for U.S. market participants to access decentralized prediction markets; and to promote the U.S. leading position in decentralized financial innovation. HPC stated that prediction markets are a natural extension of the federal derivatives framework, helping participants directly manage their economic risk exposure to real-world events and aggregating dispersed information through continuously updated market prices, whose price discovery capabilities have been widely validated, even outperforming traditional polls and expert forecasts.

It pointed out that decentralized prediction markets based on public blockchains have advantages such as transparency, non-custodial nature, and high resilience, not relying on centralized operators to hold user funds, and there is no single point of failure risk; all transactions are recorded in real-time on a public ledger, facilitating regulation and market oversight, while market access standards are more transparent and uniform.

HPC emphasized that current rulemaking should not solidify reliance on a single exchange operator, custodial intermediaries, and traditional settlement monitoring mechanisms, as this would hinder U.S. users' legitimate participation in decentralized prediction markets. It stated that it will continue to promote compliance access for U.S. market participants to Hyperliquid and HIP-4 outcome markets and will maintain communication with the CFTC.