Politics

Crypto.com Expands AI Surveillance Across Prediction…

Crypto.com has expanded its partnership with Solidus Labs to monitor prediction markets and tokenized securities, extending a surveillance relationship that previously covered its digital asset trading operations. Solidus Labs’ HALO platform will combine orders and trades with user behaviour, blockchain activity, social media signals and open-source intelligence to identify possible insider trading and market manipulation.

The expansion arrives as Crypto.com moves beyond a cryptocurrency exchange into several regulated and tokenized markets at once. Its US derivatives group operates an exchange and clearing organization, an affiliated futures commission merchant connects customers and introducing brokers, OG distributes prediction contracts through a consumer platform, and Crypto.com is expanding tokenized equity products outside the United States. Each product produces a different form of market-abuse risk, while activity by one user may cross several products, accounts and blockchain addresses.

The value of the Solidus integration therefore depends on correlation. Conventional surveillance can identify suspicious orders on one order book, but it may not reveal that the same user funded an account from a connected wallet, discussed the underlying event online, traded a related instrument elsewhere or had a relationship with someone capable of influencing the outcome. Crypto.com is using HALO to place more of those signals within one investigation process.

Crypto.com Is Building Surveillance Across a Multi-Entity Platform

Crypto.com’s US prediction contracts are offered through North American Derivatives Exchange, which operates as Crypto.com Derivatives North America. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s register lists the company as a designated contract market first approved in 2004. It was acquired by Foris DAX Markets in 2022, and its order was amended in September 2025 to allow margined futures cleared through registered futures commission merchants.

The same company is also a registered derivatives clearing organization permitted to clear margined futures and fully collateralized futures, options and swaps. Separately, Foris DAX FCM operates under the Crypto.com FCM and OG Broker names as a futures commission merchant. That structure allows Crypto.com to list contracts, operate the market, clear positions and distribute access through intermediaries, although the functions remain subject to separate regulatory requirements.

OG became Crypto.com’s dedicated prediction-market platform in February, initially placing sports at the centre of a product that also covers economics, financial markets, entertainment and culture. Crypto.com said its weekly prediction-market activity had increased fortyfold during the six months preceding the launch, providing the commercial reason for separating OG from the main application.

The surveillance problem now spans the following layers:

Product or Function Primary Risk Relevant Surveillance Data
Prediction-market exchange Insider trading, spoofing, layering and attempts to influence an event Orders, cancellations, executions and contract relationships
FCM and introducing broker distribution Linked accounts, coordinated customers and activity crossing intermediaries Customer behaviour, account relationships and transaction history
Tokenized securities Cross-market manipulation and trading while the underlying market is closed Token transactions, reference-market prices and off-chain orders
Digital assets Wash trading, wallet coordination and manipulation across venues Blockchain transfers, wallet links and centralized exchange activity
Public information environment Trading ahead of announcements or coordinated narratives Social sentiment and open-source intelligence

The announcement does not specify every Crypto.com entity, jurisdiction or data source that will feed into HALO. It also does not transfer the regulated entities’ supervisory duties to Solidus Labs. The technology provides alerts and supporting intelligence, while Crypto.com’s compliance teams remain responsible for investigating activity, applying trading restrictions and making regulatory referrals.

Antonio Alvarez Lorenzo, Chief Compliance Officer at Crypto.com, said: “As Crypto.com continues to build out a fully regulated, multi-product platform, our commitment to leading on compliance – and securing the trust of our users and regulators – only grows stronger. Solidus Labs has established itself as the gold standard for market integrity in prediction markets, so extending our partnership was a natural step.”

Prediction Markets Create a Different Form of Insider Risk

Prediction markets can be vulnerable to people who know an outcome before it becomes public, but they also create a second problem: some traders can influence the outcome on which they are trading. An employee may know what a company will announce, a campaign worker may know whether a candidate will attend an event, or a sports participant may possess information about an injury or team decision. The resulting trade may look like informed analysis until the trader’s identity and relationship with the underlying event are examined.

The CFTC provided two examples in a February enforcement advisory on prediction-market misconduct. One political candidate traded a contract tied to his own candidacy and received a five-year suspension from Kalshi, along with disgorgement and a financial penalty totalling $2,246.36. In another case, an editor associated with a YouTube channel traded before videos were published. Kalshi imposed a two-year suspension and a $20,397.58 financial penalty, including disgorgement of $5,397.58.

Those cases explain why trade and order data alone are insufficient. A profitable account is not automatically suspicious, and a sudden trade before an announcement can result from legitimate research. Surveillance becomes more useful when it can connect an account with employment information, public statements, wallet activity or a history of trading contracts involving the same organization.

The industry has already produced cases involving people with direct control or access. Kalshi referred suspicious George Santos trades to federal authorities after an account linked to the former congressman traded a market concerning his own attendance at a presidential address. The episode illustrated the central difficulty: the trader may have both private knowledge and the ability to determine whether the contract settles yes or no.

Solidus said HALO addresses that problem by correlating conventional surveillance data with user behaviour, social sentiment and open-source intelligence. The system also connects blockchain and off-chain records, allowing investigators to look for coordinated activity across wallets and platform accounts. Crypto.com has not disclosed the detection models, thresholds or intervention process it will use, which is standard for surveillance systems whose controls could become less effective if fully public.

Sports Contracts Put Surveillance Under Direct Regulatory Scrutiny

OG’s emphasis on sport raises another set of integrity questions. Athletes, coaches, officials, medical staff and other personnel can possess information that affects a contract before it becomes public. Some may also influence the event directly. A surveillance system must therefore assess trading accounts against restricted-person lists, league information and unusual activity around team announcements, rather than looking only for trading patterns familiar from equities or futures.

The CFTC’s June 2026 proposed prediction-market rules addressed that issue. The regulator said sports contracts based on objective outcomes may be less likely to conflict with the public interest when the market maintains surveillance, trading prohibitions and coordination with the relevant governing body. It also proposed treating information-sharing arrangements with sports leagues and integrity units as a factor when evaluating a contract.

Under the proposal, those arrangements could cover suspicious-trading reports, data supplied for integrity investigations, consultation before a contract is listed and restrictions applying to athletes or other prohibited traders. HALO can support the transaction-monitoring part of that structure, but it cannot by itself create the league relationships or settlement controls contemplated by the CFTC.

Surveillance also does not resolve the separate dispute over whether sports event contracts fall solely under federal derivatives law or may be restricted by states as gambling. Wisconsin filed actions against Crypto.com and four other prediction-market providers in April, seeking to stop sports-related contracts under state gambling law. The United States and CFTC responded with a federal complaint arguing that the Commodity Exchange Act pre-empts those state restrictions. The filing said at least eight regulated exchanges had collectively self-certified more than 3,000 event contracts by 28 April 2026.

Market surveillance may help Crypto.com demonstrate that its venue can detect improper trading, but it will not decide that jurisdictional conflict. The legal question concerns whether a federally regulated event contract can also be treated as gambling by a state, regardless of the quality of the exchange’s monitoring.

Tokenized Stocks Add Cross-Market and 24-Hour Monitoring

The Solidus expansion also coincides with Crypto.com’s launch of tokenized exposure to 1,500 US stocks and exchange-traded funds. The product is initially available to eligible customers in the European Economic Area and selected international markets, rather than the United States. It provides price exposure to the referenced securities without giving the token holder legal ownership or voting rights in the underlying company.

Those instruments trade continuously even when the US stock market is closed. That creates a surveillance relationship between the token price, the underlying share, cryptocurrency funding flows and any related derivatives. Thin weekend or overnight liquidity could make a token easier to move, while an artificial price on one venue could influence customers or automated systems elsewhere.

Monitoring tokenized securities therefore requires more than inspecting blockchain transfers. Investigators may need to compare the token with the underlying stock, examine the quality of the reference price, identify wallets funding several accounts and determine whether a trader is using one market to create a misleading signal in another. HALO’s combination of on-chain and off-chain information is designed for that type of investigation.

Solidus has been expanding the same model across regulated trading firms. Webull selected HALO for digital asset surveillance in the United States and Canada, while Kalshi extended Solidus monitoring from its exchange to its affiliated FCM. Rival surveillance provider Eventus is also working with STX as that company seeks approval for a prediction exchange, showing that surveillance is becoming part of the minimum infrastructure expected from new event markets.

Asaf Meir, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Solidus Labs, said: “Prediction markets represent a trillion-dollar asset class opportunity, and Solidus Labs is where the industry turns to protect it – because when it comes to prediction markets, there are no bets on market integrity. That’s exactly the standard Crypto.com holds itself to, and we’re proud to be the partner that backs it up.”

The trillion-dollar description is Solidus Labs’ projection rather than independently verified market data in the announcement. The immediate development is more concrete: Crypto.com is trying to monitor digital assets, event contracts and tokenized securities through a common surveillance system as those products become more closely connected. Whether that produces better enforcement will depend on the coverage of the data, the quality of the alerts and how quickly Crypto.com acts when the system identifies a relationship that ordinary order-book monitoring would miss.