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Michael Selig, a wonkish libertarian, hopes to secure a prominent new role for his agency by stopping other regulators from going after the startups.

When Michael Selig took up his new position as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission a few months ago, he quickly embarked on an effort that seems fitting for a Trump administration official who would like to make it possible for every American living room to become a wagering parlor.

Selig is a sports fan, and he filled the space with sports memorabilia, honoring his early childhood in the Philadelphia area. He interspersed his law books with Eagles gear—and on another shelf, he placed a particularly beloved memento. “A Charles Barkley from the 76ers,” said Selig, pointing to a glass-encased signed basketball, which sits just left of a red Make America Great Again hat.

As the agency’s new chair, Selig intends to turn the CFTC, a long-time Washington backwater, into one of the more important entities in town by crafting the rules governing prediction market startups. Those companies have seen a surge of people eager to wager on the outcome of real-world happenings. Betting on sports is very popular, as is wagering on everything from elections to the Oscars to global events, like the outcome of the war in Iran. Selig is hugely supportive of prediction markets and wants to draft regulations that help them flourish.

But in recent months, a slew of state officials have stepped in to stop or slow the industry in their states, dimming Selig’s bright ambitions for his agency. He’s now vowing to do whatever he can to outmaneuver them. “It would be very irresponsible for the chairman of the agency to just take his hands off and say, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing,’” said Selig, reclining in a wingback chair.

Over the last several years, prediction markets have seen their popularity soar. Investment bank Bernstein estimates those markets collectively will see $240 billion in transaction volume this year, up almost 400% from a year ago. It forecasts that figure could swell to $1 trillion by 2030.

As interest in these markets has surged, the startups fueling the boom have become enormously valuable. The two biggest are Kalshi and Polymarket: In March, Kalshi received a $22 billion valuation, and as recently as last month, Polymarket was in discussions for a $15 billion valuation. Their investors include all the biggest names in Silicon Valley, such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund.

The president’s family is involved in prediction markets, too. Donald Trump Jr. is a paid adviser to Kalshi, and 1789 Capital, a venture firm that counts him as a partner, has invested in Polymarket. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social has said it will have its own prediction markets feature.

So the keen attention of the tech elite now falls on Selig, a soft-spoken, wonkish 36-year-old—head of an agency created by Congress in 1974 to regulate financial futures, products related to the sale of bland but essential commodities like soybeans, cattle and eggs. The agency has gotten a little more modernized lately, and under President Trump, it has sought a role in boosting the crypto industry. In March, the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission issued new guidelines around federal securities law and cryptocurrency, and the agencies are waiting on Congress to come up with a comprehensive framework for regulating crypto.

Prediction markets, meanwhile, have become a deeply polarizing topic, particularly as concerns about insider trading on those markets have spread. Just weeks ago, for example, an Army Special Forces officer involved in capturing Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro was arrested and charged with using classified information to place a Polymarket bet related to the event. Yet the industry couldn’t hope for a more eager ally than Selig: An unapologetic libertarian, he sees it as his duty to limit governmental overreach into private industry.

“People in the prediction market space are very excited that someone is leading the CFTC that’s on their side and is fighting for these markets,” said Mick Bransfield, research director at the Coalition for Political Forecasting, an advocacy group that hopes to further mainstream prediction markets. “He’s a true believer.”

To deliver a win, Selig will need to wage an extensive legal campaign to beat back state regulators who want a shot at making rules that clip prediction markets’ wings. In Washington, he needs to shepherd the passage of his own industry rules that can hold up in court. (That might seem straightforward, but such rulemaking is always hard to achieve, especially on controversial issues, often inviting a ton of lawsuits and time-consuming Congressional hearings.) Selig is definitely on the clock: He likely needs to get it all wrapped up before the final buzzer sounds on the Trump administration a little over two and a half years from now if he wants to cement his own legacy and the agency’s place as a bigger power.

Selig is attracting the ire of critics of gambling on both the left and the right. Spencer Cox, Republican governor of Utah, has said of Selig, “These prediction markets you are breathlessly defending are gambling—pure and simple.”

Benjamin Schiffrin, director of security policy at Better Markets, a nonprofit group that advocates for more strongly regulated markets, thinks Selig’s bias is nakedly apparent. “He is a cheerleader for the prediction market platforms,” said Schiffrin, a former associate general counsel at the SEC.

Schiffrin said he worries that Selig’s great interest in prediction markets will come at a cost: that the CFTC will stop fulfilling its long-term mission of policing the country’s $500 trillion commodities and derivatives market. Said Schiffrin: “If it’s going to be distracted by boosting prediction markets, it’s not able to fulfill its core mission.”

Selig has been interested in both technology innovation and the laws that shape it from his early days.

Selig moved to Florida with his family at about age 6, and his father, a district attorney, passed along books by authors—Rand, Friedman, Hayek—that appealed to his young libertarian mind. He was intrigued, too, by the then-decentralized internet.

Later on, he discovered bitcoin and the blockchain. He loved the idea behind them. (“Freedom-enhancing technology,” he calls it.) But he worried that operating in the legal margins would limit the technologies’ growth.

“To go mainstream, you want rules and regulations and controls,” said Selig, “but you also want to create an environment where you allow people to do what they want, which is to trade stuff in a decentralized way.”

He thought he might do something about it. As a student at George Washington University’s law school, he landed a clerkship with then-CFTC Commissioner Chris Giancarlo, who, recalled Selig, was also “fascinated by crypto.”

After graduating in 2015, Selig went into private practice. As the business world started to pay more attention to crypto, Selig specialized in both crypto companies and traditional financial firms interested in getting into the space.

“He was always ambitious,” said a crypto industry executive, granted anonymity because of the sensitivities of speaking frankly about a federal regulator. “He really took a shine to where the industry is moving: Mike got there early.”

In 2022, Selig joined New York law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, looking to build out a team dedicated to digital assets led by his old boss, Giancarlo. Two years later, Selig, then just 34, made full partner—a fast-tracked ascent.

After Trump won reelection, the incoming administration soon recruited Selig to help draft the rules legitimizing crypto and named him chief counsel on the SEC’s newly minted Crypto Task Force.

Meanwhile, at the CFTC, things were in a bit of chaos last year as crypto-industry opposition sunk Trump’s first nomination for chair. Within the White House, Selig emerged as a smart, steady-minded alternative.

When I asked Dawn Stump, a former CFTC commissioner, why Selig would’ve seemed like a solid candidate, she brought up how would-be chairs are often evaluated on a question: “Can this person go toe-to-toe with the opposition?” Selig, known as a sharp and bold thinker, could.

On October 25, 2025, after Selig had spent just nine months at the SEC, Trump nominated him as CFTC chair.

Still, Selig was relatively untested.“Mike is an extremely talented lawyer,” said the crypto industry executive. “But managing a building of 650 people? It’s a lot.”

Stump, the former commissioner, said she warned Selig there wouldn’t be much of a honeymoon period. Stump had served from 2018 to 2022, and while she thought the agency had mishandled things by being more restrictive than Congress mandated, she was also cognizant that the industry had gotten even more complicated since she had left. Washington had only half-baked rules for the industry, and it was continuing to grow fast—including, starting in late 2024, into sports wagering.

“This is a real challenge,” Stump said she cautioned Selig, “and it is going to require a tremendous amount of time.”

Said Stump: “It’s not a position I envy.”

Selig was sworn into office on December 22, 2025, almost a year into the Trump administration. He had to hit the ground running.

Prediction market platforms were then already facing dozens of state lawsuits, accused of violating states’ right to regulate sports betting under a 2018 Supreme Court decision. Selig said he was worried about the precedent of not intervening.

“That risks us ceding jurisdiction to the states, and that can put our financial system at great risk,” Selig told me. “So I had to move quickly.”

In February, Selig announced the CFTC would be filing legal briefs arguing it was the sole regulator of prediction markets. Then, in April, he went on the offense, suing Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, New York and Wisconsin.

“We’re litigating to protect our jurisdiction,” Selig told me.

Selig’s tactics are irking many local lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, who see him as overstepping. The federal laws Selig says give the CFTC jurisdiction over event contracts traded on prediction markets date back to the 1930s.

Michael Meredith, a Republican in Kentucky’s House of Representatives, said the idea that they somehow apply to a boom in online sports wagering is, said Meredith, “a stretch.”

Not at all, Selig told me: “The statute says in very plain text that the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction over all derivatives.” He went on: “That’s black-letter basics.”

Courts across the country have differed on the simple legal question at the center of these cases—do states have jurisdiction over wagering on sports through prediction markets or does the federal government? That likely makes it an appealing case for appellate courts.

Said Selig, “We’re happy to, of course, argue it all the way to the Supreme Court if it goes that far.”

As Selig fights to defend what he sees as his complete jurisdiction over prediction markets across the country, he’s figuring out what to do with that authority back in Washington.

Before his arrival, Selig thinks, prediction markets were subject to the ad hoc legal interpretations of CFTC staffers, stymying the industry—and driving it offshore.

In 2024, a federal court agreed that the CFTC had been arbitrary in the decisions it had made concerning prediction markets, finding that it had inappropriately denied Kalshi permission to offer wagering on congressional elections.

In response, companies began applying to the CFTC for permission to operate and offer contracts on everything from politics to sports.

“The floodgates opened,” Selig told me, but the agency didn’t have the infrastructure to deal with the deluge—leaving it stuck in a cycle of ad hoc decision-making.

It’s a tough spot, as some people who study or work in prediction markets are urging caution while others are telling Selig to hurry up.

Rajiv Sethi, professor of economics at Barnard College and author of the forthcoming book “Engines of Prophecy: The Power and Perils of Prediction Markets,” references Polymarket’s efforts to become fully licensed in the U.S.: “If the CFTC is to approve the reentry of Polymarket into the American market, they should do so while insisting on some form of identity verification” for traders.

John Phillips is a co-founder of PredictIt, which last year finally received licenses to operate for which it had applied in 2021. “Under Selig,” said Phillips, “are these licenses going to be expedited? Because it shouldn’t take four years.”

“We need guidelines. They need to be explicit,” Selig told me. “The firms want to comply, but they don’t always know what the rules are.”

And so, in mid-March Selig’s CFTC took the first step toward issuing legally binding regulations—soliciting public feedback on the stickiest questions facing the CFTC, like defining what constitutes insider trading on real-world events.

Selig’s CFTC has shown by its actions that, unlike the agency under past administrations, it is conceptually open to markets on both elections and sports, said Harry Crane, a professor of statistics at Rutgers University and a member of the CFTC’s council of advisers on innovation, announced by Selig in February. “Now they’re allowing those markets, but the question is…where should the line be drawn?”

Taking public comments seriously is how you figure out what sort of trading to allow, said Selig. “We’re certainly going to move quickly to get rules in place,” he said, but “there may be things that the public’s concerned about that we’re not thinking about.”

The comments pouring in from critics of prediction markets have said the agency would gamify violence, ignore addiction issues and trample on hard-won Native American gaming rights by allowing those markets to proliferate.

Selig said he’ll digest it all before the commission finalizes rules. It’s a lot of power: While the CFTC at full strength has five commissioners, Selig is at the moment its sole commissioner and its sole vote.

Along the way, Selig can’t make it look like the substance of the rules is preordained. After all, there is a 1946 federal law governing regulation making that requires regulators to remain open-minded.

Schiffrin of Better Markets, the nonprofit group that advocates for more strongly regulated markets, thinks Selig long ago decided what he will do. To illustrate his point, Schiffrin pointed to the CFTC adviser council, which includes people like Rutgers’ Crane as well as Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan: “It sure seems like he’s already made up his mind.”

Selig argues that any risks of prediction markets are addressable. I asked Selig about a White House letter cautioning staffers not to trade on information gained through their jobs in the wake of reported insider trading on military actions. Federal employees are already prohibited from benefiting from nonpublic information, Selig pointed out.

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There’s tremendous upside for Selig if he can pull it all off before his time runs out, either at the end of his term in 2029 or before a change in party control of the White House.

CFTC chairs traditionally go on to fairly quiet jobs: head of public policy at Bloomberg, for example, or president of fintech firm Circle, or law firm partner.

One standout is Obama-era CFTC Chair Gary Gensler, who made his name in Washington regulating derivatives after the 2008 financial crisis. In 2021, then-President Joe Biden rewarded Gensler with the job of SEC chair.

Selig has the chance to similarly put his stamp on U.S. financial markets. And a Republican party eager to be seen as the center of innovation may well reward him. Could he go on to some higher post in, say, a JD Vance administration? At the moment, the Kalshi market on the 2028 GOP nomination shows Vance leading the field.