Minnesota governor bans state workers from insider trading on prediction markets
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed an executive order on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, barring state employees from using confidential government information to trade on prediction markets. The action targets insider trading by officials with access to non-public data. Walz said he is reinforcing strong ethical standards. The order follows a federal judge's temporary blocking of a new state law that would have banned prediction markets outright. The move comes as prediction market platform Kalshi has banned politicians and athletes from its platform.
The executive order creates a compliance template that other state governments can copy quickly. For prediction market platforms, it means navigating a patchwork of ethics rules layered on top of uncertain preemption status. Kalshi and Polymarket must now monitor state employee trading restrictions alongside their existing bans on politicians and athletes. A leaked procurement decision or regulatory timing could still move markets before platforms can detect it.
Traders face the risk that additional states impose similar insider trading rules without harmonized definitions of what constitutes non-public government information. The platforms' surveillance tools are not built to flag state-level data asymmetries. Minnesota's action signals that even states friendly to prediction markets will erect barriers around government-adjacent trading.
Minnesota's executive order joins a federal judge's blocking of the state's felony prediction market ban as part of a broader regulatory pushback against CFTC-registered platforms, placing the state alongside Michigan, New York, and Washington in the ongoing state-federal preemption fight.