Data Reporting Requirements for Certain Event Contracts (RIN 3038-AF73)

The largest single cluster in the record: eight DCMs, FCMs, and industry coalitions independently argue that requiring a DCM to collect customer-identifying information duplicates KYC/AML data an FCM already holds for intermediated customers, adds cybersecurity exposure without a clear surveillance benefit, and should be dropped or satisfied via FCM-held records on request. This reads as coordinated industry messaging — shared talking points among competitors — rather than a copy-pasted campaign; no identical boilerplate text was found across filers.

• Coinbase Derivatives, LLC: “A rule that requires DCMs to collect the same information for intermediated customers would be unnecessarily duplicative.”
• DraftKings Inc.: “The registrant holding the information may differ; the customer's entitlement to protection should not.”

A second industry-adjacent cluster focused on the mechanics of the proposed 125,000-contract threshold and how positions get aggregated across related contracts, arguing for principles-based definitions and risk-based (rather than gross-count) aggregation, plus concerns that integrated, self-cleared platforms don't fit the framework's assumed separation of DCM/FCM/clearing-member roles.

• Sporttrade Inc.: “Evaluating those positions independently… may significantly overstate the participant's actual market exposure.”
• De Silva Law Offices, LLC: “When the machinery of individualized relief must be automated, the case for a rule has made itself.”

A three-letter series from Brubaker Public Relations argues the Proposal's core design flaw is that it reports on transactions, not on the relationships that produce them — leaving no visibility into whether a contract's designer, market-maker, and exchange operator are the same entity. The series culminates in a formal Administrative Procedure Act challenge that the Proposal departs from the generally-applicable derivatives-reporting framework without the reasoned explanation required by State Farm and Fox Television.

• Steven G. Brubaker, Brubaker Public Relations, Inc.: “The Commission cannot regulate relationships it does not identify, and it cannot identify relationships it does not collect as reportable data.”
• Steven G. Brubaker, Brubaker Public Relations, Inc.: “That authority is real. But it functions, for this population, only when the Commission gets lucky, not when its own surveillance program is working as designed.”

Independent researchers and a forecasting-market advocacy group argue the opposite direction from the industry cluster on public data: the four proposed fields (timestamp, ticker, quantity, price) and one-year minimum retention are insufficient to verify performance claims, price hedges, or support multi-year election and economic-indicator research, and ask for richer fields, machine-readable bulk access, and longer retention.

• Chris Park, MSR Decode: “Those four elements are sufficient to publish a price tape and insufficient to verify a performance claim.”
• Coalition for Political Forecasting: “It would be a poor outcome if federally regulated DCMs offered materially less historical transparency than offshore, unregulated venues trading economically similar contracts.”

A vendor and data-infrastructure cluster flagged internal inconsistencies between the rule text and the preamble's stated intent (reporting windows, threshold units, ticker persistence, off-facility "look-alike" contracts) and asked for conforming fixes, an explicit 15-minute reporting window, and long-horizon cryptographic durability for retained settlement records.

• Tara Manuel, KOR Reporting Inc.: “'As soon as practicable' is not a standard; it is a placeholder.”
• Jennifer Aun, Stellar Quanta Labs, LLC: “The record will outlast the cryptography that secures it.”

Data Boiler Technologies filed the same letter twice (the second an administrative resubmission correcting a cc: name, not new substance) arguing that routing retail customers through direct clearing members under the new framework strips them of Public Customer status and NFA arbitration rights, and that vertically integrated DCM/DCO/FCM platforms concentrate systemic and antitrust risk that a data-reporting rule alone cannot address.

• Kelvin To, Data Boiler Technologies, LLC: “Checks and balances between DCM…, DCO…, and FCM… are key to preserve US derivatives market's integrity.”

Two commenters with backgrounds in betting-integrity and civil litigation argue Section 16.03(g)'s proposed fields aren't the right ones for actually matching identities across accounts and events — both recommend adding date of birth as a more durable identifier than occupation or employer, and ask the Commission to explain how this data will feed the companion AF65 rulemaking's supervisory assessments of sports and prediction markets.

• Jonathan Russell: “Surveillance value comes from a small number of reliable, matchable fields rather than from breadth of collection.”
• Jonathan Van Dusen: “The definitional problem follows the doctrine from one docket to the next.”

Two related filings ("Apes Together Strong" and an individual, Conan Mak) each open with roughly a page of coherent argument about un-netted derivatives reporting and the Archegos collapse, but the attachments are otherwise dominated by thousands of lines of unrelated leaked-document excerpts, unsourced and numerically implausible exposure figures, and social-media handle lists with no bearing on the AF73 proposal.

• Apes Together Strong: “the proposed taxonomy risks providing a mere 'regulatory wrapper' for a system that remains fundamentally exposed to catastrophic liquidity distortions.”

An individual commenter, organizing around a Change.org petition cited in New York Times coverage, argues event contracts settling on clinical-trial outcomes and FDA decisions create incentives to leak nonpublic trial data and cannot resolve cleanly given how clinical results evolve — a public-interest objection that sits closer to the companion AF65 rulemaking than to AF73's reporting mechanics, but was filed in this docket.

• David Tsai: “Clinical trials are not casinos. Don't place bets on human lives.”

Better Markets argues the Commission's own conduct is inconsistent — asserting event contracts are swaps for jurisdictional purposes while now proposing to report them like futures — and contends that many event contracts, such as those on sports outcomes or reality-TV results, are simply gambling products the public also perceives that way, rather than legitimate risk-management derivatives.

• Benjamin L. Schiffrin, Better Markets, Inc.: “It is astounding for the CFTC to continually insist that all event contracts constitute swaps yet now propose a reporting regime that does not treat event contracts as swaps.”

A tax attorney takes no position on the core proposal but flags that its non-preclusion disclaimer is too narrow to prevent AF73's data-reporting characterizations from being cited in future tax disputes, and asks that retail participants who fall below the reporting threshold still be entitled to their own transaction records on request.

• Joshua Hamlet, Clarity Tax Counsel PLLC: “Both sides of every dispute will quote the sentence that helps them, and the Commission's silence will be read as acquiescence.”

Brazilian exchange B3 S.A. argues the Proposal's rationale for futures-style reporting is venue-neutral and should extend to economically identical event contracts listed on registered Foreign Boards of Trade, warning that excluding them would create a competitive distortion unrelated to any actual regulatory risk.

• B3 S.A. – Brasil, Bolsa, Balcão: “Requiring SDR reporting solely based on the foreign status of the venue would create a distortion unrelated to the regulatory risks the proposal seeks to address.”

The Futures Industry Association supports the reporting-modernization goal but argues limiting the Proposal to fully collateralized event contracts is impractical, since FCM systems that flag a contract for futures-style treatment also trigger the entire futures regulatory package (segregation, margin, residual interest) rather than reporting alone.

• Allison Lurton, Futures Industry Association: “We agree that the serial, ad hoc nature of no-action relief on this issue is less than desirable.”

An independent researcher proposes adding a nonpublic "agent-control layer" to the Commission's data — automated-origin flags, deploying-entity identifiers, and synchronized-withdrawal detection — to anticipate risks from increasingly API-accessible, algorithmically-traded event contract markets, explicitly framed as preventive rather than a response to an identified current problem.

• Zeyuan Li (Amy Li), W-Axis Lab: “The operative classification should be automated-origin, not 'AI-generated.'”