Three letters dated Tuesday also go to Aristotle Exchange, which runs PredictIt, and each sets the same return date of October 13. The Hyperliquid letter's central example is not an event contract but a leveraged short on bitcoin and ether perpetuals, and the $1.1 billion figure attached to it sits in a footnote citing a press column.
James Comer, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent letters on Tuesday to Hyperliquid Labs, Crypto.com and Aristotle Exchange, the company that operates PredictIt, demanding records on how each verifies who its users are and how it detects and reports suspicious trading. All three set the same return date: “as soon as possible but no later than October 13, 2026.”
The committee describes this as a continuation rather than a new inquiry. It opened the investigation in May with letters to Kalshi and Polymarket, and says those two have since produced nearly 1,000 documents and five briefings. “As online prediction platforms grow and become more mainstream, some bad actors have exploited the platforms to make thousands of dollars by placing bets based on nonpublic information,” Comer said. The letters put the scope more narrowly: the committee is examining “the adequacy of company safeguards to prevent the use of nonpublic or classified information by government employees, contractors, and other insiders to profit from trading on event contracts.”
All three letters rest on the same allegation. Each cites an April 24, 2026 federal indictment of U.S. Army Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, which the committee says alleges that he used classified information about Operation Absolute Resolve, the military operation that ended in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, to place wagers producing more than $409,000 in personal gain on Polymarket. That is a charge rather than a finding, and Polymarket is not among the three recipients.
The Hyperliquid letter, addressed to co-founder Jeff Yan, is the one that sits awkwardly inside the committee's own framing. Its central example is not an event contract on a government outcome but a position in perpetual futures. The body of the letter describes only “a substantial leveraged short position” and calls it a transaction “precisely timed to a nonpublic government decision, executed on a platform with apparently no identity verification or mechanism to refer the responsible party to U.S. law enforcement.”
The figures usually attached to that episode are not the committee's own. The $1.1 billion size, the bitcoin and ether perpetual contracts it was spread across, the roughly 30 hours between the position opening and President Trump's post on tariffs, and the more than $150 million in profit all appear in a footnote citing an October 2025 column on Investing.com. None of them appear in the letter's own text. The committee is asking Hyperliquid for records about the episode, not reporting a conclusion about it.
The seven categories Hyperliquid is asked for cover identity verification policies, the technologies and vendors behind them and any change to them since January 2024; how anomalous trading is detected and whether it has been referred to the Justice Department or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; records on event contracts tied to Federal Reserve decisions, elections and geopolitical outcomes; how personal data is collected and stored; compliance documentation with the CFTC; any officers, directors, employees or advisers holding U.S. security clearances; and an assessment of what anomalous trading has cost the platform in market integrity and reputation.
Crypto.com's letter, to chief executive Kris Marszalek, runs to ten demands and contains four the others do not. The committee wants any policy restricting employees with advance knowledge of the company's own corporate actions, such as token listings, from trading related event contracts, and any instance in which an employee did so. It also asks for records of federal employees trading contracts related to cryptocurrency regulation, and for the information barriers separating staff who know about pending regulatory action from the trading side. Those questions treat an exchange's own regulatory pipeline as tradable information.
The PredictIt letter, to John Aristotle Phillips of Aristotle Exchange, carries seven demands and is the most election-focused of the three. It asks for contracts tied to nominations, confirmations, elections and legislative action in which current or former government employees, officials or contractors are “known or suspected to have participated as traders,” and for the criteria the venue applies when deciding whether a proposed contract is a permissible political event or significant political question.
Trading ahead of nonpublic information through perpetual futures has already produced criminal charges in the United States. Two former Robinhood engineers each face one Commodity Exchange Act count and one wire fraud count over perpetuals bought on Hyperliquid before Robinhood announced listings, a case that reaches commodities law precisely because the instruments were derivatives rather than spot tokens. Enforcement has been running abroad as well, where Korean police referred 18 Polymarket users to prosecutors this month.
Congress has been circling the same sector from two directions. Seven Senate Banking Democrats asked for a public hearing on prediction markets last week after a Republican-only roundtable with Kalshi's chief executive. The underlying legal status of the contracts is still moving too: the Sixth Circuit ruled this month that Kalshi's sports event contracts are not swaps, the third appeals court to rule and the first Kalshi has won.
The committee has not accused any of the three companies of wrongdoing, and a document request establishes nothing on its own. October 13 is the date the letters set.
