On the record: Brierly's CFTC comment on the prediction-markets NPRM is submitted

Brierly has submitted its comment on the Commission's proposed rule, 'Prediction Markets; Public Interest Determinations' (RIN 3038-AF65; 91 FR 35806, published June 12, 2026), to the public docket on regulations.gov, ahead of the July 27, 2026 comment deadline. The full letter — sections, suggested citation, and references — is published unedited on the Policy page; this note is the short version of what it argues and why.

The proposed rule would permit sports outcome contracts while disallowing single-play props, injury markets, officiating-call markets, pre-collegiate markets, and pure-luck games. We read that line as tracking the right thing for the wrong stated reason. What the disallowed families share is not 'sport' — it is low resolvability: a discrete, fast, judgment-laden event with no canonical record, where reasonable parties will read the result differently. The same low-resolvability signature appears well outside sport, in exactly the markets our record shows breaking most often: a 'mention' that turns on a muted feed, a 'ceasefire' that turns on which government is treated as authoritative, an 'invasion' that turns on an undefined threshold of control.

So the comment makes one narrow, evidence-based point: the variable that best predicts a contested settlement is resolvability — whether a contract names a canonical source, defines its terms, and fixes its clock — not the subject the contract is about. It is grounded in the coded record, not in anecdote. As of submission the dispute database holds 21 coded 2025–26 settlement disputes carrying $1.1B+ in de-duplicated reported volume, every case sourced and dated, and classified into five recurring failure modes; two of them — definitional vagueness and source dependence — account for most of the dollars.

From that record we argue a settlement-integrity standard should require five things on the face of each contract: a named, primary resolution source; an explicit definition of every operative term; a designated timezone and a stated clock; boundary, rounding, and controlling-print rules for any numeric threshold; and tie/cancellation handling with a structured, time-boxed dispute window. These are not novel inventions — they are the safeguards whose absence produced every nine-figure dispute in the record. And we argue the assessment itself should be independent, methodology-public, and reproducible from the contract text, so the same input yields the same grade for the Commission, the venue, and any member of the public who re-runs it. A venue grading its own listings is structurally conflicted: it wrote the language it would be grading.

Filing the comment was always going to be the founding-record entry for the firm — independent, sourced, reproducible, and on the public record under its own name, which is the whole of what Brierly is for. The letter and its references are on the Policy page; the evidence base is the public dispute database; and the methodology that scores the five safeguards is public and reproducible. Informational only — not legal advice.