Rep. James Comer has widened an existing inquiry to press Crypto.com, Hyperliquid and PredictIt for records on identity verification and suspicious trades. The expanded probe asks specifically for documents tied to government insiders, employee trading activity and referrals of suspicious activity. It lands as prediction and trading platforms face heavier scrutiny from Washington, and it puts three very different businesses under the same document request.
What Comer is asking for
The request is narrow on paper and broad in practice. Identity verification protocols are the first target: how each platform confirms who its users are, and what happens when that process falls short. The second is employee trading — whether staff at these venues are trading on information the public doesn't have. The third is referrals for suspicious activity, the paper trail platforms are supposed to keep when something looks off.
Crypto.com is a large retail exchange. Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetuals venue. PredictIt is a political prediction market. Grouping them in one request suggests the committee is looking at a pattern rather than a single incident, and each will have to answer on its own terms. A centralized exchange keeps KYC files. A decentralized venue often doesn't have a compliance desk in the traditional sense. A prediction market sits somewhere in between, and its users are frequently betting on the exact kind of political outcomes Comer's committee deals with daily.
Why prediction markets are in the crosshairs
The timing tracks with a broader push in Congress to figure out what to do with event-based trading. Prediction markets have moved from a niche curiosity to a real venue for political and economic wagers, and regulators have struggled to fit them into existing rules. Comer's interest in government insiders is the sharp end of that. If people with access to nonpublic information are placing bets on platforms that look like markets, the line between trading and gambling gets thinner, and the case for oversight gets louder.
None of this is a charge of wrongdoing. A records request is just that — a demand for documents. But it's a signal about where the committee's attention is headed, and companies on the receiving end tend to lawyer up fast.
The compliance problem for each platform
For Crypto.com, the ask is mostly operational: hand over the KYC and trade surveillance records. For Hyperliquid, the harder question is whether a decentralized venue can produce the kind of insider-trading data a congressional committee expects. For PredictIt, the issue is political exposure as much as compliance — its markets are literally about the people doing the investigating.
How each responds will shape what comes next. A fast, complete production of documents tends to quiet things down. A slow or partial one invites more requests. The committee hasn't set a public deadline, and none of the three platforms has said publicly how it plans to respond.
The next concrete step is the document production itself. Watch for whether the committee narrows its focus to one platform or widens it again, and whether any of the three pushes back on the scope of the request. That fight, if it comes, will be the real story.
