Fed Opens Payment Account to Crypto Firms, Blockchain.com Files IPO, NHL-CFTC Pact

Crypto News

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has secured a new memorandum of understanding with the National Hockey League covering oversight of prediction-market betting on professional games. Coming weeks after a similar pact with Major League Baseball, the deal commits both parties to share information about event contracts tied to NHL matches, helping the agency police insider trading and related abuses. The league, which already lists Kalshi and Polymarket among its official prediction-market partners, will integrate the regulator's monitoring into its existing integrity framework. Chairman Mike Selig framed the arrangement as another guardrail safeguarding fans and market participants as wagering volumes climb across the wider blockchain-anchored prediction ecosystem.

Veteran exchange Blockchain.com has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement for an initial public offering on U.S. equity markets, the firm disclosed Thursday. Pricing and share-count details remain undecided, though the company — once carrying a private valuation near $14 billion — joins a swelling pipeline of digital-asset businesses aiming for public listings. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in the United Kingdom, Blockchain.com claims more than 100 million wallets created and over $1 trillion in lifetime on-chain transactions. The filing follows last year's debuts from stablecoin issuer Circle, Gemini, Bullish and Figure Technologies, underscoring how rapidly the industry is graduating from venture-backed obscurity into mainstream capital markets.

IG Europe has struck a partnership with Austrian exchange Bitpanda to launch spot crypto trading for clients across the European Union. The London-listed brokerage, which already rolled out spot crypto in the United Kingdom and Australia, will rely on Bitpanda's liquidity pipes, market-data feeds and custodial infrastructure rather than building its own stack — extending coverage across major Bitcoin and altcoin pairs. Esteve Jane, IG Europe's managing director, said the agreement expands the firm's asset menu while meeting tightened compliance demands under the Markets in Crypto-Assets regime. The arrangement underscores how MiCA's rigorous capital, governance and custody requirements are pushing established brokers to partner with licensed crypto specialists.

The Federal Reserve has opened a 60-day public-comment window on a proposed "payment account" that would grant legally eligible non-bank financial institutions, including Bitcoin-native custodians and other crypto-focused firms, direct access to the central bank's clearing and settlement rails. Unlike a traditional master account, holders would receive no intraday credit, no discount-window access and no interest on balances, while automated controls would block transactions that risk an overdraft. The Board emphasized that statutory eligibility criteria remain unchanged; the product simply offers a stripped-down alternative. The announcement arrived a day after President Donald Trump ordered regulators to review digital-asset firms' access to federal payment infrastructure.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers underscored the urgency behind these regulatory pacts during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing this week. Committee Chairman Ted Cruz warned that bad actors — including some athletes themselves — risk "sowing doubt in the minds of fans" if prediction markets become vehicles for manipulation. Prediction-market wagering volumes have ballooned alongside spot-crypto trading, drawing both retail interest and concerns about fraud, match-fixing and insider activity. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said the league's new information-sharing framework with the regulator will sharpen its capacity to identify and deter suspicious patterns, signalling that integrity has moved to the centre of the prediction-market policy debate.

The Fed's payment-account proposal cannot be read in isolation from the Trump administration's wider push to pull digital-asset firms inside the federal banking perimeter. The May 19 executive order titled "Integrating Financial Technology Innovation into Regulatory Frameworks" directed federal regulators to identify and remove rules that block fintech and crypto businesses — from stablecoin issuers to DeFi infrastructure providers — from Fed payment services, setting a six-month deadline for action. The Board's revised closing-balance limits, now tied to expected payment activity rather than fixed caps, signal a more permissive posture than the December 2025 prototype. For firms long shut out of master accounts, even a stripped-down rail represents a structural shift.

Threaded through these announcements is a single arc: established financial infrastructure is being re-engineered to absorb crypto rather than wall it off. Regulators are codifying integrity guardrails for prediction markets, the Federal Reserve is sketching narrower pathways into its payment rails, traditional brokers are partnering with licensed crypto specialists under MiCA, and digital-asset companies themselves are queueing for public listings. The cumulative effect, against the backdrop of an ongoing bull market, is institutional rotation at speed — crypto firms graduating from peripheral actors into regulated counterparties operating inside the same plumbing as banks, exchanges and equities desks. Convergence, not isolation, is the dominant narrative this cycle.