George Santos has earned groundbreaking status as the first person ever banned for life from prediction market platform Kalshi, after allegedly placing manipulative trades on whether he would attend Trump's State of the Union speech earlier this year — a market that ultimately paid out on his non-attendance, which he had bet on after initially suggesting publicly he would attend. Kalshi said Santos placed large trades in the contract, then made public statements — some false or misleading — to influence the price of yes and no contracts before the event. The disciplinary action includes a fine of more than $70,000 on top of the lifetime ban, while Santos made roughly $18,000 on the trades; federal authorities are reportedly looking into the matter separately. The enforcement came alongside four other Kalshi cases that resulted in temporary bans after those traders cooperated — the contrast with Santos, who didn't cooperate, explains the permanent outcome. At the same time, the CFTC fined a former White House teleprompter operator $170,000 for betting on words he knew Trump was planning to use in public remarks, and Polymarket says it has referred more than 100 manipulation cases to authorities ahead of the midterms.
Strategy made its first bitcoin purchases since late June last week, adding 4,603 coins for $369.7 million at an average price of $80,318 each — funded via $602.8 million in common stock sales, with the remaining proceeds split between $151.8 million in preferred stock buybacks and additions to cash reserves. The company now holds 845,050 BTC purchased for $63.73 billion at an average of $75,412 per coin. MSTR rose 1.65% pre-market as bitcoin traded around $78,400.
Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, is adding tZERO to the infrastructure stack behind its planned NYSE-affiliated market for tokenized securities — investing in the firm, licensing its 103 blockchain patents, and working with it on the transfer-agent and broker-dealer systems needed to settle tokenized trades on-chain. tZERO is expected to become an approved digital transfer agent on ICE's platform, subject to regulatory approval, meaning it would track ownership of tokenized shares as they change hands. The two firms will also explore using tokenized assets as collateral at ICE's clearing houses — a step that would let tokenized securities back trades across ICE's broader markets. ICE had already tapped Securitize in March for a similar role; the addition of tZERO comes despite the two tokenization firms currently being in active litigation over patent infringement claims.
