Must be legal in at least 48 states. (This is to allow for some holdouts, but not a patchwork of different regulations; they should be broadly legal in general.)
It's ok if they require some approval process, but it needs to be general and reasonable. Asking the CFTC for a special exception like PredictIt had to do is no good. Nor will it count if the process technically exists but is made so difficult or expensive as to be impossible in practice. But if it's similar to the bureaucracy airlines have to go through, that still counts as YES; flying commercial flights is obviously legal in the US in the common-sense meaning of the term.
The laws must actually support legal prediction markets before the close date. An announcement of future changes to laws in e.g. 2026 does not count.
It doesn't matter whether any platforms are actually taking advantage of the new laws, they just need to exist. This is true even if it would be impossible for any platform to complete the process by the end of 2025. (e.g. the new law comes into effect on December 1st and it takes 1.5 months to finish, that still resolves YES.)
In general, if the vibe is "not much has changed" this will probably resolve NO, and if the vibe is "wow this is so much better", and prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Manifold are moving into the legal real-money space, this will probably resolve YES.
If there is a "middle-ground" result, where prediction markets get more legal but still not "generally legal" in a common-sense way, this resolves PROB according to a vote of Manifold users. Regular users get 1 vote each, Manifold mods get 3 votes each, and I get votes equal to 20% of the total other votes.
Guidelines for the vote is that the regularity regime as of market creation = 0%, and a regulatory regime as described in the bullet points above = 100%. Voters can choose for themselves exactly where in the middle they think the system is at the end of 2025.
1,000https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9046-25
“Unfortunately, the undue delay and anti-innovation policies of the past several years have severely restricted the CFTC’s ability to pivot to common-sense regulation of prediction markets,” said Acting Chairman Caroline D. Pham. “Despite my repeated dissents and other objections since 2022, the current Commission interpretations regarding event contracts are a sinkhole of legal uncertainty and an inappropriate constraint on the new Administration. Prediction markets are an important new frontier in harnessing the power of markets to assess sentiment to determine probabilities that can bring truth to the Information Age. The CFTC must break with its past hostility to innovation and take a forward-looking approach to the possibilities of the future.
@Tyler31 If a real-money prediction market were to materialize out of nowhere, it must be legal to run.
@IsaacKing I'd suggest defining it in terms of the establishment of a formal regulatory framework for seeking approval for prediction markets.