James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, has widened his inquiry into insider trading on prediction markets to three more platforms: Crypto.com, Hyperliquid and PredictIt, which is owned by Aristotle Exchange.
Letters sent on Tuesday ask each for records on how it verifies users’ identities, how it detects suspicious trading, which trades it flagged as possibly based on nonpublic information, and what it referred to regulators or law enforcement over the past two and a half years. Comer wants the trading records by 13 October.
Each letter has its own focus. Crypto.com is asked whether employees traded on contracts tied to unannounced corporate decisions such as token listings, and whether officials bet on crypto regulation.
Hyperliquid is asked about a large leveraged short opened shortly before a US tariff announcement last October. PredictIt is asked about bets by current or former officials on elections, nominations and government actions.
Comer opened the probe in May with letters to Kalshi and Polymarket and says he has since received nearly 1,000 documents and several briefings. His stated aim is to measure how common insider trading is, and possibly to draft a law barring government officials from these markets.
As the platforms have gone mainstream, he said, some bad actors have used them to profit from information the public did not have.
A letter compels very little, though. Kalshi and Polymarket have American businesses with every reason to cooperate. A decentralised exchange where traders are identified by wallet rather than by name is a different kind of respondent.
How fully Hyperliquid answers, and whether it can say who opened that short, is the real measure of how far this inquiry reaches.
