The CFTC's Prediction Market Gambit: Event Contracts, Federal Preemption, and the Long Road to the Supreme Court

The validators went quiet in Washington, and the silence was the tell. Two measures landed at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the noise around them was almost perfectly calibrated to hide the signal. No protocol was named. No token, no treasury, no unlock schedule, no oracle architecture. Just four load-bearing facts dressed in legal language: the Commission has floated two proposals; those proposals attempt to separate a prediction market from a casino; they are built to force a question that could climb all the way to the Supreme Court; and every inch of the fight turns on whether Washington or the fifty states get to decide. That is the entire payload. And it is enough, if you know how to read the noise floor. I have spent the last several years running nodes and stress-testing claims that looked clean on a whitepaper and disintegrated under load. I watched an entire ecosystem die in eleven days, and I watched a smaller one quietly heal while the press wrote its obituary. So when a regulator drops two proposals and refuses to name a single market participant, I do not treat that as a gap in the reporting. I treat it as a signal about what the message is actually for. The CFTC did not publish a project analysis. It published a jurisdictional claim, and jurisdictional claims are the most durable narratives in crypto, because they outlive every token that trades on top of them. Here is the anomaly, stated plainly: a federal agency is moving to define a category of financial product in a way that would strip power from state regulators, in a country where gambling law has been a state prerogative since before the telegraph. That is not a compliance update. That is a constitutional argument wearing a rule-making costume. Validating the signal amidst the validator noise means ignoring the platforms for a moment and staring directly at the structure underneath them, because the structure is the story. The Four Facts, and Why Four Is a Number I want to be transparent about the density here, because the temptation to over-read a thin brief is exactly the trap I have spent my career trying to avoid. The source material I am working from contained exactly four extractable information points. There was no technical architecture, no tokenomics, no team, no governance structure, no price data, no funding rates, no on-chain metrics. Four facts, and nothing else. That sparseness is not a flaw in the brief. It is a description of the brief's function. A document with four facts and no names is not a project analysis. It is a policy signal, and policy signals are read differently from project analyses. When you analyze a protocol, you look for the code, the supply curve, the incentive design. When you analyze a policy signal, you look for the direction of travel, the institutional posture, and the gap between what is stated and what is implied. So let me state the four facts in the plainest possible terms, stripped of editorializing. First: the CFTC has put forward two measures. Second: those measures are intended to distinguish a prediction market from gambling. Third: the framing explicitly anticipates a dispute that could reach the Supreme Court. Fourth: the core of the dispute is the boundary between federal and state jurisdiction. That is it. There is no fifth fact. And I want to resist the instinct to manufacture one. The honest analyst's move here is to say clearly what is not in the brief, and then to reason from the structure of what remains. What is not in the brief: the legal form of the measures, whether they explicitly name event contracts, whether they assert preemption in so many words, whether any court has accepted a related case, and how state regulators are responding. Each of those omissions is itself informative, and I will get to them. But first, the context, because the brief assumes a history it never states, and that history is the only reason these four facts matter. How We Got Here: A Short, Load-Bearing History Strip the crypto branding off a prediction market and you find something old. A prediction market is a venue where participants trade contracts whose payout is tied to whether a real-world event resolves a specific way. An election. A rate decision. A court ruling. A temperature reading at a named airport on a named day. The contract does not care about your opinion. It resolves true or false, and the price is simply the market's live probability estimate. The mechanism has been studied for decades. Academic literature has circled it since at least the mid-twentieth century, and its modern institutional form is far newer. The core claim is simple and, in several documented cases, empirically supported: a market with real money at stake aggregates information better than a poll, because a poll asks what you believe and a market makes you pay for being wrong. That is the entire pitch. It is a truth machine with a price feed. For most of the last twenty years, prediction markets existed in a legal gray zone in the United States. The dominant argument against them was that they were gambling: you put money down on an uncertain future event and you either win or lose. The dominant argument for them was that they were information aggregation, a continuous incentive-weighted forecast that occasionally outperformed traditional polling. The tension is not academic. It is existential for the category. If a prediction market is a gambling product, it lives under a patchwork of state gaming statutes, some permissive, some restrictive, some that ban wagering outright. If it is a federally regulated derivative, it lives under a single national framework, and the states are largely preempted from banning it. That fork, gambling versus derivative, is the entire game. Everything else is decoration. The United States already has one venue that walked the derivative path. A federally licensed exchange obtained a designated contract market designation and listed event contracts, and that path triggered exactly the fight you would expect. A federal regulator authorized the contracts. State gaming regulators and assorted officials objected. The dispute became a question of whether a federally licensed venue can offer products that individual states consider gambling within their borders. This is established industry background. The brief that seeded this analysis did not name the venue, but the shape of the conflict is well documented, and it is the template for everything that follows. On the crypto-native side, the picture is different. Offshore and on-chain prediction platforms have historically avoided the U.S. market precisely because the legal exposure was unquantifiable. They settled in stablecoins, they leaned on blockchain rails, and they served users the American regulatory perimeter could not easily reach. That is not a technology story. That is a jurisdiction story. And jurisdiction stories end the same way every time: someone, eventually, has to decide who is in charge. So the history reduces to a single sentence. Prediction markets have spent two decades trying to prove they are finance rather than gambling, and the proof has always depended on which regulator is willing to say so first. The Economics of a Bet That Isn't a Bet Before I get to the mechanism, I want to spend a moment on how these things actually make money, because the business model explains the regulatory posture better than any legal doctrine. Prediction markets, at the platform level, do not primarily earn through token inflation. The leading venues in this category have historically operated without a native token, settling in stablecoins and monetizing through trading fees, bid-ask spreads, and liquidity incentives. That is a critical structural fact. It means the category's value capture looks more like an exchange than like a DeFi lending protocol. This matters for two reasons. First, it means the category carries a lower tokenomics risk profile than most of the sector. There is no unlock cliff waiting to dump on retail, no emissions schedule propping up a yield that does not exist. The revenue is fees, and fees come from volume, and volume comes from users, and users come from legality. The chain of dependency terminates in regulation, not in token design. Second, it means the category's growth ceiling is set by law rather than by capital. A DeFi protocol can scale until its incentives run dry. A prediction market scales until it hits a jurisdiction it cannot serve. The constraint is not liquidity mining. The constraint is a map. This is why the CFTC proposals matter so much more than their thin content suggests. If the legal map widens, the addressable market widens with it, and the fee revenue follows mechanically. There is no technology breakthrough required. There is no new oracle primitive needed. There is a legal boundary, and the boundary is being redrawn. That is the whole trade. And it is also why the reflexive bull case is dangerous. If your entire thesis rests on a legal boundary moving, then your entire thesis rests on an institution, not a product. Institutions move slowly, they reverse, and they answer to political cycles. A product thesis survives a bad quarter. A legal thesis survives a bad election only if the law is already settled. Here, it is not. Core: The Mechanism, Unpacked Start with the instrument. The legal carrier of a prediction market in the U.S. derivative framework is the event contract, a derivative whose underlying is whether a specified event occurs. The Commodity Exchange Act gives the CFTC authority over derivatives, and event contracts sit inside that authority if they are structured as such. The agency has, at various points, wrestled with which event contracts are permissible and which cross into something it considers contrary to the public interest, such as contracts that resemble gaming. Here is where the structure gets interesting. The CFTC's two measures, read together, appear designed to do two things at once. First, to affirmatively classify certain event contracts as within the federal derivative framework, which is to say, as financial products rather than bets. Second, to assert that this classification carries preemptive force, meaning a state cannot simply outlaw the product within its own borders because it disapproves of the underlying activity. Federal preemption is the load-bearing beam of this entire structure. Under Supremacy Clause logic, when Congress, or an agency acting under delegated authority, occupies a field, state law that conflicts with federal law gives way. If the CFTC successfully occupies the field of event contracts, the fifty-state patchwork collapses into a single national rule. For any venue that has been playing defense against state gaming regulators, that is a categorical improvement. But preemption is not a switch you flip. It is a doctrine you win. And the moment an agency asserts it over something states have long regulated as gambling, you have manufactured a federalism dispute. The brief's own language, that the measures are paving the way for a fight that could reach the Supreme Court, is the tell. Agencies do not casually invoke the Supreme Court. When they do, they are signaling that they expect the lower courts to disagree, and that the real resolution will come from the top. Let me be precise about why federal is better than state for this category, because the intuition is not obvious and the counterargument is real. State gambling law is fragmented and, in places, severe. Some states permit broad sports and event wagering. Some permit narrow categories. Some prohibit nearly everything. A venue trying to serve a national user base under state-by-state rules faces an impossible compliance surface. It must either geo-fence aggressively, which destroys network effects, or accept that it is illegal somewhere. For an on-chain venue, geo-fencing is even harder, because the whole point of the rails is that they are permissionless. You cannot easily tell a smart contract that a given wallet is in a restricted jurisdiction without reintroducing exactly the kind of gating the ecosystem was built to avoid. Federal classification flips that. One regulator, one rulebook, one set of permissible contract types. For a category whose growth has been throttled by legal uncertainty rather than technical limitation, that is the single most valuable thing that could happen. It converts an unbounded legal risk into a bounded compliance cost. And here is the part most coverage will miss. The market impact of this is not a price catalyst on any tradable token. It is a re-rating of an entire category's addressable market. Prediction markets have never been valued on their technology. They have been valued on the size of the population legally allowed to use them. Widen that population from offshore and grey to national and regulated, and you have not improved the product. You have improved the denominator. But you have also imported a set of obligations that the crypto-native version of this category never had to carry. And that is where the bull case starts to fracture. The Re-Centralization Trap I ran a low-end validator node through the 2021 congestion era, and the lesson I took from it was not about throughput. It was about what happens to a system's architecture when it is forced to serve a demanding, regulated class of user. Latency stops being a nuisance and becomes a liability. Uptime stops being a goal and becomes a contractual term. And once uptime is a contractual term, someone has to be accountable for it, which means someone has to be able to intervene. Apply that logic to prediction markets under a federal derivatives framework and the picture sharpens uncomfortably. Derivatives markets in the United States do not run on permissionless rails. They run on cleared infrastructure, with central counterparties, margin rules, reporting obligations, and know-your-customer requirements baked into the plumbing. If prediction markets are formally brought inside that framework, as the bullish reading of these proposals suggests, they do not simply get a legal green light. They get a legal green light wired to a compliance spine. That spine has consequences. A central counterparty means a single point of guarantee and, in practice, a single point of control. KYC means identity is no longer optional at the protocol level. Reporting means positions become visible to a regulator. None of these are fatal. Regulated finance works fine with all of them. But they are the precise opposite of the properties that made on-chain prediction markets attractive to their earliest users. The contrarian-in-structure insight here is that regulatory clarity and decentralization are not complements in this category. They are substitutes. The clearer the legal status, the more the architecture has to bend toward the institutions that grant it. You can have the permissionless version or the federally blessed version. The proposal is a bet that the second is worth more than the first. That bet may well be correct on revenue. It is almost certainly a loss on ethos. This is the same pattern I have watched play out in every corner of the space where compliance and composability collide. The moment a venue needs a legal wrapper, the wrapper becomes the product. The code becomes a feature of the wrapper rather than the other way around. I have audited protocols that made this trade, and the ones that survived did so by becoming something other than what they were originally for. That is not a moral judgment. It is a structural one. Regulation does not neutralize architecture. It selects for a particular kind of architecture, and that kind is the one with an off switch. Where the Technical Crux Actually Lives The brief contained no technical content. Zero. But a prediction market has one irreducibly technical nerve, and it is worth naming, because the regulatory outcome determines whether that nerve is allowed to stay decentralized: resolution. Every prediction market contract has to resolve. Someone or something has to declare that the event happened or did not. In a casino, the house resolves. In a well-designed on-chain market, resolution is delegated to an oracle, a mechanism that reports the outcome, ideally with economic incentives and dispute windows that make lying expensive. The oracle is the truth machine. And the truth machine is exactly where regulators will look first. If the federal framework requires that resolution be performed by an entity the regulator can hold accountable, then the oracle must be, at minimum, legally identifiable, which pushes toward permissioned or hybrid oracle designs. That is not a small detail. It is the difference between a market that can be censored and one that cannot. A regulator who can lean on the resolver can effectively determine which events are allowed to resolve cleanly and which get stuck. I have said before that when the logic fails, the chaos begins, and in prediction markets the logic is the oracle. If resolution is centralized for compliance reasons, you have not built a prediction market with a regulatory wrapper. You have built a regulated polling booth with a blockchain receipt. The distinction matters enormously to anyone who cares about the censorship-resistance properties that justified the category in the first place. The bullish case never addresses this. It treats regulation as a gate that, once opened, lets the same decentralized product reach more people. The honest case is that the gate comes with a doorman, and the doorman has opinions about who gets to resolve what. Every time I have stress-tested a claim of decentralized resolution, I have found a smaller and more centralized control point than the marketing implied. The oracle is where that gap is widest, and it is where the compliance spine will attach itself first. The Unnamed Competitive Map The brief did not name a single platform, and I will respect that by keeping the map at the level of categories rather than inventing specifics. But the competitive structure is legible without names, and it explains why the proposals land differently on different players. There are two archetypes in this category. The first is the licensed venue: a federally regulated exchange that already holds the legal instruments to list derivatives and has been building toward exactly the kind of classification these proposals would formalize. For this archetype, the proposals are a tailwind. Federal preemption would neutralize the state-level challenges that have been its principal existential risk, and its existing compliance posture would become a moat rather than a cost center. The second archetype is the crypto-native venue: an offshore or on-chain platform that has served the U.S. market indirectly, if at all, and whose value proposition rests partly on the fact that it is not a licensed American exchange. For this archetype, the proposals are a double-edged instrument. Yes, preemption would remove the fifty-state patchwork. But it would also subject the platform to a single, powerful regulator with a national mandate and the authority to define what a permissible event contract is. Under the current fragmented regime, an offshore platform can simply decline to serve the United States and avoid the question entirely. Under a preemptive federal regime, the question becomes whether you are operating in the U.S. market or not, and the answer increasingly determines whether you can exist at all. Federal clarity is a gift to venues that want to be regulated. It is a threat to venues whose entire value proposition is that they are not. The broader point is that regulatory clarity is not a tide that lifts all boats. It is a filter that rewards a specific configuration and punishes its opposite. And the configuration it rewards is the one that already looks like the regulator's mental model of a legitimate financial institution. That is not a conspiracy. It is how regulation has always worked. The proposals do not create winners and losers. They reveal which was which all along. The AI-Agent Connection I spent part of 2026 auditing the convergence of AI and crypto, and I want to bring that experience to bear here, because it connects to prediction markets in a way that is not obvious. When my small team tested several AI-agent interaction protocols on-chain, simulating malicious behavior to find narrative loopholes, we discovered that most autonomous agents were actually centralized control points wearing a decentralized costume. The bottleneck was not intelligence. It was identity. An agent could act, but it could not prove who it was, and without that proof, every claim of autonomy was a claim about a server rather than a protocol. The same problem applies to prediction markets, and it is about to get worse. As AI systems become participants in these markets, the resolution layer has to answer a question that is fundamentally about identity: when an event resolves, who is the authoritative source, and how do we know the source is what it claims to be? An oracle that reports outcomes is only as trustworthy as the identity of the entities feeding it. And identity is exactly the axis on which the regulatory framework will press hardest, because identity is what makes a market governable. This is why I flagged decentralized identity as the next major sector shift in my 2026 audit, and why the prediction market debate is a preview of a much larger argument. The regulation fight is not really about event contracts. It is about who gets to define truth in a system where truth is a market output. Once you see it that way, the four facts in the brief stop looking thin. They start looking like the opening move in a game that extends well beyond gambling law. Contrarian: The Things Everyone Is Getting Wrong Now the part that pays for the article. Three widely repeated assumptions about this development are, in my read, either premature or backwards. Assumption one: this is a fast-arriving win. It is not. The brief itself is explicit that this is groundwork for a fight that could reach the Supreme Court, and Supreme Court-level disputes are measured in years, not quarters. Even a favorable lower-court ruling gets appealed. Even an accepted petition takes a full term to argue and decide. In the meantime, the category sits in exactly the legal uncertainty the proposal was supposed to dissolve. The market is likely to price the headline as if clarity has arrived. Clarity has not arrived. Clarity has been scheduled, provisionally, for a date nobody can yet name. Assumption two: federal preemption is unambiguously good for on-chain venues. It is a double-edged instrument, and the edge facing the crypto-native platforms is sharper than the bulls admit. Yes, preemption would neutralize the fifty-state patchwork. But it would also subject those venues to a single, powerful regulator with a national mandate and the authority to define what a permissible event contract is. Federal clarity is a gift to venues that want to be regulated. It is a threat to venues whose entire value proposition is that they are not. Assumption three: the category's bottleneck is regulation. This one I want to push on hardest, because it is where my read diverges most sharply from the consensus. The consensus says prediction markets are throttled by legal risk. Remove the risk and the category scales. I think that is only half true. The deeper bottleneck is liquidity, and specifically, the fragmentation of liquidity across too many venues, too many contract types, and too many jurisdictions. This is a pattern I have watched metastasize across the space for years, and it is the same disease that has hollowed out Layer 2 ecosystems: dozens of deployments, each with a technically distinct architecture, all competing for the same small pool of actual users and actual capital. The technology multiplies. The liquidity divides. Prediction markets have the same structural problem in a different costume. You do not need fifty regulated event-contract venues any more than you need fifty rollups serving the same four thousand users. You need depth. A prediction market with thin liquidity produces noisy prices, and noisy prices destroy the single thing the category claims to offer: a trustworthy probability estimate. A market that cannot be trusted to price an event correctly is not an information aggregator. It is a slot machine with extra steps. Regulatory clarity without liquidity consolidation produces a legal, compliant, and still-broken product. The brief's four facts tell you nothing about how the category solves depth. And no amount of preemption solves depth. That is a market-structure problem, not a legal one, and the industry keeps mistaking one for the other. There is a governance parallel here that I have flagged repeatedly in other contexts, and it applies with uncomfortable precision. Prediction markets are often pitched as instruments of collective intelligence, the crowd pricing the future. But look at who actually sets the terms. The event universe is curated. The contract specifications are chosen. The resolution sources are designated. That curation is a governance function, and it is exercised by a very small number of actors, regardless of how permissionless the trading layer appears. On-chain governance turnout across the ecosystem has been stuck below five percent for years, and the pattern holds: a thin, motivated set of large holders and insiders makes the decisions that everyone else trades against. A prediction market that lets you bet on an event does not let you decide which events exist, and the gap between those two things is where the real power sits. The regulation fight is about who supervises the market. It is not about who designs it. Those are different questions, and only one of them is on the table. And I would extend the same skepticism to the adjacent narrative that always attaches itself to prediction markets: the idea that programmable, dynamic instruments will finally give creators and information producers a fair cut. I have audited enough of these designs to be blunt. A more complex payout structure does not create demand. It redistributes whatever demand already exists, usually toward the parties best positioned to model it. Artists, analysts, and content producers do not need a more sophisticated royalty mechanism. They need buyers who show up every month. Complexity is not the same as stability, and the prediction-market category is about to relearn that lesson in public. Reading the Collapse Before the Narrative Breaks Here is my honest structural read, and I will mark it as a read rather than a fact, because the brief gave us four points and I am not going to pretend it gave us forty. The direction of travel is toward federal classification and, eventually, federal preemption. That is the agency's revealed preference. Whether it survives contact with the courts is a separate question, and the brief's own framing, preparing for a Supreme Court fight, tells me the agency expects to lose at least one round before it wins or loses the war. If the federal position ultimately prevails, the winners are the venues that already built toward a licensed, compliant posture. They get a national market and a moat made of regulatory relationships. The losers, in the medium term, are the venues that built their entire identity around avoiding exactly that posture, because the thing they were avoiding is about to become the price of admission to the largest market on earth. If the federal position ultimately fails, if the courts side with state authority, the winners are the states and the incumbents who never needed federal permission. The losers are every venue that bet its roadmap on a preemption that never came. And the category as a whole loses years, because the clock resets. Notice that both branches are slow. Neither resolves next quarter. That is the single most actionable fact in the entire brief, and it is the one the market will most reliably misprice. The temptation to treat a regulatory headline as an arrival is overwhelming. It is also wrong. What we have is a departure, the start of a long, uncertain journey, announced in language deliberately vague about the destination. I have watched this movie before. In 2022 I tracked stablecoin outflows during a collapse that everyone else was busy calling the end of the world, and the signal I cared about was not the panic. It was the cluster of addresses quietly accumulating while the narrative screamed. The lesson was not to buy the dip. The lesson was that the crowd reads the headline and the sophisticated actor reads the timeline. Right now the headline is that the CFTC has moved on prediction markets. The timeline is that nothing is decided for years. If you are trading the headline, you are the exit liquidity for someone trading the timeline. Transmission: Who Actually Feels This First Policy signals do not transmit evenly. They propagate through a chain, and the order of transmission tells you where the durable value sits. The most direct beneficiary of any move toward federal classification is the category itself, but the second-order effects are where the interesting trades live. If event contracts become a clearly federal instrument, the demand for compliant resolution infrastructure rises, because the oracle layer is where the regulatory risk concentrates. That is a structural tailwind for resolution and data-availability providers, and it is the kind of tailwind that shows up in revenue rather than in narrative. Exchanges are the next node. Federal clarity could open the door to new event-contract product lines, election markets, macro-data markets, and the trading volume that comes with them. That is a medium-term effect, and it depends entirely on whether the classification actually lands. Traditional finance is the far node, and the slowest. If prediction markets are confirmed as legitimate derivatives, they intersect with event-driven hedging and event insurance, opening a path for real-world events to be brought on-chain that is distinct from the real-world-asset narrative. That is a long-term effect and, frankly, a speculative one. But it is the node where the category's ceiling gets lifted from retail speculation to institutional hedging, and it is worth watching precisely because almost nobody is watching it yet. What is not on the transmission chain is any immediate, tradable price catalyst. The brief named no token, no platform, no instrument. Anyone claiming to have identified a direct beneficiary is inferring, not reporting. I will do the inferring, but I will label it as such. The brief gave us structure. It did not give us a ticker. What I Am Actually Watching I keep a short list of signals for situations like this, because the temptation to over-read a thin brief is exactly the trap I have spent my career trying to avoid. Here is the list, and it is deliberately narrow. First, the legal form of the two measures. A proposal can be an interpretive rule, an enforcement guidance document, or a formal notice of proposed rulemaking. These are not equivalent. An interpretive rule is a statement of how the agency reads existing law. It is cheap to issue and weak in force. A formal rulemaking is a binding rule with the force of law, and it survives only if it withstands challenge. The brief did not tell us which. The strength of the entire thesis hinges on a distinction the brief omitted, and that omission is itself informative. It suggests the measures are not yet final in form, which means the narrative is running ahead of the paperwork. Second, whether the measures explicitly name event contracts. If they do, the applicability to prediction markets is direct. If they speak only in general derivative terms, the connection is an inference, and inferences are where narratives go to die. Third, whether the measures assert preemption in so many words. The word preempt is the fulcrum. If it appears, the federalism fight is live and the Supreme Court path is real. If it does not, the whole thing may be a much softer repositioning dressed up in strong language. Fourth, whether any court accepts a relevant case. The brief says the groundwork is being laid for a fight that could reach the Supreme Court. Groundwork is not a petition. I want to see a certiorari grant, not a press release about one. Fifth, the reaction of state regulators. If state attorneys general and gaming commissions start filing suits and issuing cease-and-desist orders, the conflict is real and moving. If they stay silent, the federal move may be happening in a vacuum, which is its own kind of signal about how much the states think is actually at stake. Sixth, and this is the one most people will ignore: the compliance announcements of the platforms themselves. The moment a venue starts adjusting product lines or restricting regions in response to these proposals, you know the proposals have teeth. Announcements are cheap. Product changes are expensive, and expensive signals are the only ones worth trading. Run the nodes, read the filings, and let the expensive signals do the talking. That is the discipline this situation demands, and it is the discipline the market will abandon within a week of the first headline. Takeaway The CFTC has moved to redraw the boundary between a bet and a derivative, and in doing so it has quietly opened one of the more consequential federalism questions in modern financial regulation. The brief that seeded this analysis gave us four facts and no names, and I have resisted the urge to invent the rest. What I can tell you is what the structure implies: a long fight, a category-wide re-rating that depends on an outcome nobody controls, and a market that will almost certainly price the announcement as if the outcome were already known. So here is the question I am holding, and I will leave it with you rather than answer it. If prediction markets finally get the federal clarity they have spent a decade begging for, and if that clarity arrives bundled with the clearing, reporting, and identity infrastructure that makes federal clarity possible, will the category still be the thing its builders set out to build? Or will we have won the legal argument and lost the architecture? I have run the nodes. I have read the collapse before the narrative broke. And my read is that the most important thing about these two proposals is not what they permit. It is what they will require. Chasing the alpha through the forked trails means following the fork that has not happened yet, and this one has a docket number waiting for it somewhere up the road.