Blockchain.com said on October 13, 2026 that it has filed 2 applications with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates derivatives and, increasingly, event-contract and prediction markets, seeking the licenses it would need to run a regulated exchange and brokerage for American customers. One application asks the agency to designate the company a Designated Contract Market (DCM); the other seeks to register it as a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM).
If the agency approves both, Blockchain.com, the crypto wallet and brokerage platform founded in 2011, would be able to offer crypto derivatives (futures and options) alongside prediction-market event contracts to retail and institutional users in the United States, all through its existing app. Neither application has been approved, and the US offering depends entirely on the CFTC signing off.
The filing adds a large, well-known name to a fast-growing line of companies seeking federal permission to operate prediction markets onshore, at a moment when the CFTC is actively writing the rules for event contracts.
What the two licenses would actually do
Each application covers a different job. A Designated Contract Market is the CFTC designation that lets a company operate a fully regulated exchange, the venue where futures and event contracts are listed and traded. A Futures Commission Merchant is the registration that lets a firm act as the broker and intermediary, holding customer funds and routing their trades.
Filing for both at once signals that Blockchain.com wants to own the whole stack: the marketplace and the brokerage that connects users to it. Executive Chairman, CEO and co-founder Peter Smith framed the plan as collapsing asset management, derivatives trading and event-based trading into a single app. "Users should be able to manage their digital assets, trade derivatives, and take positions on real-world events easily, without jumping between different apps," he said.
What Blockchain.com already offers abroad
The US filing is an attempt to bring onshore something the company already runs internationally. Blockchain.com already offers prediction markets to eligible international users through a partnership with Polymarket, the largest prediction-market platform, plus perpetual futures powered by Hyperliquid, a decentralized derivatives protocol. Both launched earlier in 2026 and are available only in eligible markets, which do not include the United States.
The company's own announcement did not name either partner. The structure matters because it shows what a US product would look like: event contracts and derivatives are already live in the app for users outside America, and the CFTC licenses are the missing piece that would switch them on for US customers.
A crowded line at the CFTC
Blockchain.com is not filing into an empty field. It joins 11 other companies that filed for DCM licenses in 2026, a year in which the CFTC has approved 6 new contract markets. Those counts are not a simple before-and-after: the approvals and the fresh applications are separate figures, and together they describe an agency processing a surge of interest in regulated event trading.
That surge is the real story behind this filing. Prediction markets have moved from the regulatory margins toward a federally supervised category, and the companies that win a DCM designation first will set the template for how event contracts (including sports) are listed and resolved in the US.
CBOE24%YesNo
ForecastEx20%YesNoThe IPO sitting behind the filing
The CFTC applications arrive while Blockchain.com is also preparing to go public. The company confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 21, 2026, the first formal step toward a US initial public offering. Reports have put the target at roughly $500 million in proceeds at a valuation of $4 billion to $6 billion.
Read together, the moves describe one strategy: a company building a regulated US footprint (exchange license, broker license, public listing) rather than operating from offshore. A CFTC-supervised derivatives-and-events business is a cleaner story to take to public-market investors than an international-only one.
The regulatory resume
Blockchain.com's pitch leans on a run of recent approvals in other jurisdictions. Over the past year the company has secured MiCA authorization through Malta's financial regulator (the EU's crypto-asset licensing regime), an FCA registration in the United Kingdom, and a VASP license in the Cayman Islands. The CFTC filing is the attempt to add the United States, the largest and most closely watched of these markets, to that list.
By its own figures, the platform has reason to want in: founded in 2011, it reports more than 95 million wallets created, more than 44 million verified accounts, over $1.1 trillion in crypto transactions processed, and a presence in more than 70 jurisdictions. Those are company-reported lifetime totals, but they describe the scale of the user base Blockchain.com would be bringing to a US prediction-market and derivatives product.
What happens next
News of the filing first surfaced on October 9, 4 days before the company's formal announcement, and nothing about the timeline changes the one fact that governs everything else: until the CFTC rules, there is no US product. Blockchain.com has the international plumbing, the regulatory track record and the IPO paperwork lined up, but its American prediction-market ambition now sits in the same queue as 11 other DCM hopefuls, in front of an agency that has said yes 6 times this year and is still writing the rulebook those approvals will follow.
