Crypto's courtrooms stayed busy this week, with three separate cases touching on FTX's collapse, prediction-market trading, and the regulatory boundaries of betting on real-world events.
Michelle Bond, a former congressional candidate, filed a motion Friday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York seeking to exclude her husband's guilty plea from evidence in her own campaign finance case. Bond faces charges tied to her unsuccessful 2022 congressional run in New York, with prosecutors alleging that FTX facilitated contributions to her campaign through her husband, Ryan Salame — the exchange's former co-CEO, who pleaded guilty in 2023 and is serving a 90-month sentence.
Bond Seeks to Separate Her Case From Salame's Plea
Bond's filing argues that Salame's guilty plea "lack[s] any probative value as to Ms. Bond's guilt, knowledge, or intent," noting that the two were not married during the period when the alleged offenses occurred. The filing also references the couple's ongoing divorce and custody proceedings as further reason to keep the plea out of her trial.
Santos Ordered to Pay Over Kalshi Bets
Separately, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered former congressman George Santos to pay a $17,500 civil penalty plus $17,570 in disgorgement — a combined $35,070 — over manipulative trading on the prediction market platform Kalshi. Regulators found Santos made "material misrepresentations and omissions" in social media posts about his plans to attend the 2026 State of the Union address, profiting more than $17,500 from bets tied to those posts. He was also handed a three-year ban from trading on prediction markets. Santos had previously been sentenced to 87 months for wire fraud and identity theft in 2025 but served only three months before his sentence was commuted.
Soldier Challenges Insider-Trading Charges Over Maduro Bet
In a third case, US soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke is contesting charges that he used nonpublic military information to place more than $400,000 in bets on Polymarket tied to the January operation that removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In a 51-page memo filed Friday in the Southern District of New York, Van Dyke's defense argues the Commodity Exchange Act is "ambiguous" as applied to prediction markets, asking "how can ordinary citizens have fair notice that prediction market wagers are covered by the CEA?" Van Dyke has pleaded not guilty, with a trial potentially set for late 2026 or early 2027.
Together, the three cases illustrate how deeply prediction markets and crypto-adjacent platforms have become entangled with US securities and derivatives law — and how much is still unsettled about where the legal lines sit.
