President Donald Trump is expected to attend a White House meeting with senior crypto and prediction market executives on Wednesday, August 19, a day ahead of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) first Innovation Advisory Committee session.
What We Know So Far
Politico first reported on August 13 that the White House was expected to host the gathering, citing three anonymous sources who said the details remained in flux and that it was unclear who would attend, including whether Trump himself would be there.
By August 15, Bloomberg reported that SEC Chair Paul Atkins would join, according to an agency spokesperson, and Semafor reported the same day that invitees include executives from Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, Ripple, Chainlink, Kalshi, and Paradigm, along with the Digital Chamber and Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers for Digital Assets.
The meeting is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Eastern time at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing, and is intended as a kickoff for the CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee, which holds its inaugural meeting the following day.
Crypto and prediction markets have each become significant flashpoints in Washington since Trump returned to office, with his administration’s regulators broadly embracing both industries even as legal and legislative fights continue on separate tracks.
What the CFTC Committee Will Cover
The Innovation Advisory Committee meets Thursday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern, and the public can watch online, according to a Federal Register notice. Selig named the committee’s 35 members back in February, including Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and representatives from Cboe, CME Group, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp, and Nasdaq.
Selig released the meeting’s agenda, which covers three sessions: crypto asset regulation, artificial intelligence, and prediction markets, giving the committee a broader mandate than crypto policy alone despite its origins as a crypto-focused body.
Prediction market oversight is a central open question the committee plans to address specifically, including the respective roles of federal and state authorities and recent state litigation and enforcement actions.
Selig has argued the CFTC holds exclusive jurisdiction over event contracts and has already sued several states over their efforts to restrict Kalshi and Polymarket.
Both platforms faced new legal hurdles just this week as Baltimore sued Kalshi and Polymarket over sports-related contracts, and a Washington state court ordered Kalshi the same day to halt most of its offerings there. Our earlier coverage of the CFTC’s recent guidance to prediction market platforms covers a related piece of this same regulatory landscape.
Trump’s Own Position, and a Family Connection Worth Knowing
Trump has already sided with Selig in this jurisdictional fight. In May, he called exclusive CFTC jurisdiction over prediction markets “critically important” in a Truth Social post.
Separately, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, serves as a strategic advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket and has invested in Polymarket through the venture capital firm 1789 Capital, a connection worth being aware of given the same companies’ regulatory fate is a direct topic at this meeting.
Where This Leaves the CLARITY Act
The meeting comes as the crypto industry’s top legislative priority, the CLARITY Act, remains stalled in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed a week earlier, setting a vote for 2:15 p.m. Eastern on September 15, the day the Senate returns from recess.
Invoking cloture requires 60 votes and would not itself amount to final passage of the bill.
What Comes Next
Neither the White House meeting nor the CFTC committee session is expected to produce binding rules on its own, since both function as coordination and advisory sessions rather than formal rulemaking.
The federal-versus-state jurisdictional question specifically has been building for months through a growing string of state lawsuits and enforcement actions, so a coordinated federal response at this meeting could mark a turning point in that fight even without any formal rule being issued on the spot.
What this means for you: this pair of meetings brings the administration, regulators, and industry executives to the same table on two issues, crypto market structure and prediction market jurisdiction, that remain unresolved, so treat this as a signal of where the conversation is heading, particularly with the CLARITY Act’s own cloture vote still a month away.
