President Donald Trump on Thursday framed the rise of online prediction markets as part of a larger cultural shift toward a “casino” world — comments that come as U.S. prosecutors unmasked a high-profile insider-trading case tied to one such platform.
“This whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino… I don’t like it conceptually,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, saying prediction markets and similar betting sites were “a crazy world” and “a much different world than it was.” The remarks follow growing scrutiny of markets that let users stake money on geopolitical events, elections and macroeconomic outcomes.
A federal indictment this week offers a concrete reason for concern. Prosecutors charged U.S. Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke with using classified information about a military operation—named in court papers as “Operation Absolute Resolve,” the mission tied to Nicolás Maduro’s capture in early January 2026—to place winning bets on Polymarket. According to the indictment, Van Dyke funneled roughly $33,000 into 13 wagers between late December and late January, consistently betting that U.S. forces would enter Venezuela and Maduro would be ousted before month’s end. After the operation became public and the markets settled, he allegedly withdrew most of the proceeds and attempted to obscure his identity by deleting his account and routing funds through crypto channels. Prosecutors say he ultimately earned more than $400,000.
The Justice Department charged Van Dyke with misuse of confidential government information, wire fraud and commodities fraud. “Our men and women in uniform are trusted with classified information… and are prohibited from using this highly sensitive information for personal financial gain,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement accompanying the indictment.
The case has intensified regulatory and public scrutiny of prediction markets, which have ballooned in size and scope. TRM Labs data cited by prosecutors and industry observers show monthly trading volume across these platforms climbing from roughly $1.2 billion in early 2025 to more than $20 billion by January 2026, with over 800,000 unique wallets active each month. Much of that activity now centers on geopolitics and elections, making these markets into fast-moving barometers of real-world events.
That growth has brought legal challenges. Firms such as Polymarket and Kalshi have been accused by critics of operating like unlicensed gambling sites; the companies argue they are information-aggregation tools that price probabilities and act as financial instruments rather than traditional bets.
The politics around prediction markets touch the White House in another way: Donald Trump Jr. serves as an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket and has publicly promoted prediction markets’ ability to reflect outcomes faster than traditional media during elections. A spokesperson for Trump Jr. previously told CNN he does not trade on prediction markets and has not represented either company to the federal government. President Trump himself once ran a casino empire in the 1980s before a series of bankruptcies closed those operations — a biographical detail that underscored his “casino” framing.
The article also notes an industry-specific link: prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, reportedly uses the USD1 stablecoin issued by the Trump-backed DeFi platform World Liberty Financial as its settlement layer.
As regulators, prosecutors and market operators wrestle with how to police insider information in decentralized and fast-moving markets, the Van Dyke indictment serves as a test case for how traditional laws on classified material and financial fraud apply to novel crypto-native products. Decrypt has reached out to the White House and Polymarket for comment and will update this story if more information becomes available.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
