Railbird Secures CFTC Approval to Operate as a Designated Contract Market

A New Player Joins the Regulated Ranks

Railbird Exchange landed its DCM status earlier this month, making it a rare startup to gain such recognition from the CFTC. While the public announcement came on June 18, the formal approval was dated June 13. The green light caps a regulatory journey that began in early 2023 and spanned over two years of filings, tweaks, and scrutiny.

This designation clears the path for Railbird to offer trading in event contracts, essentially bets on real-world outcomes like inflation rates, elections, or even pop culture moments, under full federal oversight.

Unlike some of its predecessors in the prediction space, Railbird isn’t trying to slide in under ambiguous regulatory language. It’s all-in on compliance. Its contracts will be fully collateralized and cleared through a CFTC-registered derivatives clearing organization, QC Clearing, LLC. The platform will run on an anonymous central limit order book, with no futures commission merchants involved unless rules change down the line.

It’s a non-intermediated model, clean and lean by design, where trades settle in real time or with next-day updates (T+1), and regulatory reporting, investigations, and arbitration procedures are baked into its compliance responsibilities.

Mission: Market Insights in Real Time

Railbird’s pitch is simple but ambitious: help people and institutions make better decisions by offering liquid markets in sectors where outcomes matter.

The team’s goal is to generate insights that reflect the true probabilities of future events, powered not by punditry, but by money on the line.

That vision puts Railbird in the company of other prediction market upstarts like Kalshi and Polymarket, but with a regulatory stamp that those platforms have struggled to maintain without controversy.

Railbird isn’t flying solo. The company emerged from the 2022 Y Combinator cohort and has since pulled together a leadership team with experience from heavyweights like Point72 and Coinbase.

CEO Miles Saffran and COO Edward Tian co-founded the exchange, and their advisory board includes notable names like former CFTC Commissioner Dawn Stump and ex-Vitol counsel Ron Oppenheimer.

Still a Question Mark Around Sports

One elephant remains in the room: sports. Railbird’s roadmap mentions the category, but state regulators and attorneys general have flagged it as problematic.

Kalshi, for example, is still battling multiple states over whether its markets constitute illegal sports betting. Railbird appears to be steering clear of that fray, for now.

There’s no indication yet that the company will list sports event contracts at launch.