Tribal leaders push Senate to add prediction market limits to crypto bill
More than 100 tribal leaders are lobbying the Senate to add prediction market restrictions to the Clarity Act before a key procedural vote. The push targets the crypto-focused legislation as a vehicle for limiting prediction market activity. The lobbying effort comes as the bill faces procedural hurdles and tribal gaming interests have already signaled opposition to prediction market language in federal legislation. Crypto.com, ProphetX, and Fanatics are mentioned in passing in coverage of the effort. No specific prediction-market provisions sought have been detailed in available reports.
The tribal lobbying turns the Clarity Act into a battleground over prediction market federalism, not just crypto regulation. Tribal governments hold outsized leverage in gaming policy; any carve-out they secure would restrict where platforms operate on tribal lands or in states with tribal compacts. That fragments the national market operators like Kalshi and Polymarket are trying to build under CFTC registration.
The timing is acute: the bill already failed one cloture vote, so every amendment added or blocked changes the coalition math for passage. Platforms now face dual risk — the bill stalls and leaves state patchwork intact, or it passes with tribal restrictions that create new geographic exclusions. Either outcome forces operators to model revenue around partial market access rather than uniform federal rules. The tribes are betting that embedding limits in statute beats fighting platform launches state by state.