House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent document-request letters to Hyperliquid Labs, Crypto.com and Aristotle Exchange on Sept. 29, widening a prediction-market insider-trading inquiry that until now had focused elsewhere. CNBC first obtained the letters. The three firms are the newest names swept into a review that Comer has been building out over recent weeks.
Aristotle Exchange owns PredictIt, the long-running political wagering market. Hyperliquid Labs runs a decentralized perpetuals venue that has grown into one of the larger on-chain trading platforms. Crypto.com is the retail exchange.
The letters, and who got one
All three requests went out the same day. Comer's committee asked each company to hold onto and hand over documents tied to the inquiry, though the letters as reported don't spell out a specific allegation against any single firm. The committee chairman has framed the broader effort as a look at whether people with inside knowledge of political or market-moving events are trading on it through prediction markets.
PredictIt's involvement matters because the platform sits at the intersection of the two threads here: political event contracts and a regulated US footprint. Hyperliquid Labs and Crypto.com bring very different business models into the same document pile — one decentralized, one a centralized retail exchange.
Why the committee is looking at prediction markets
The inquiry follows a stretch in which prediction markets drew fresh attention from Washington. Event contracts have moved from a niche product to something with real volume around elections, policy decisions and macro data. That growth has raised the question of who gets to trade them and on what information.
Insider-trading rules in traditional securities are settled law. Applying them to event contracts is not. That gap is the space Comer's committee appears to be probing, and it explains why the letters reach across such different kinds of venues.
Where this goes next
The committee is collecting documents now. What it does with them — a public hearing, a referral, or nothing at all — depends on what comes back. None of the three companies has issued a substantive public response to the letters as of this writing.
The practical question for the firms is timing and scope: how much internal trading data they can produce, and how fast. For the committee, the test is whether the documents show a pattern worth escalating or just scattered activity that's hard to prove.
