Type neal kumar polymarket into Google right now, and you will land on a Financial Times letter instead of a court filing. On October 5, Polymarket’s chief legal officer published a short public defense of prediction markets. It arrived just weeks after New York sued the company over gambling claims. The letter itself runs a few paragraphs. The legal fight sitting behind it does not.
Who Is Neal Kumar?
Kumar is not a typical startup lawyer. He spent years as counsel in the CFTC’s Office of the General Counsel, then worked as a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher before Polymarket hired him as chief legal officer. That background matters here. The core argument against Polymarket is that it runs an unlicensed betting shop. Kumar’s job is to convince regulators, courts, and now the public that it runs something closer to a financial exchange.
What the Letter Actually Argues
The letter’s central claim is simple: Polymarket does not act like a bookmaker. In his own words, “Prediction markets such as ours do not set any odds, we do not benefit from customer losses, traders can exit at any time, and orders are matched on a central limit order book by price and time priority.”
Translate that out of legal-speak. A sportsbook sets a price, takes your bet, and profits when you lose. Polymarket instead matches one trader’s buy order with another trader’s sell order and takes a small fee either way. Kumar frames this as price discovery rather than wagering — traders pooling information to arrive at a probability, similar to how a stock exchange prices a company rather than betting against its customers.
The New York Lawsuit Behind the Timing
The letter did not appear in a vacuum. New York’s attorney general sued Polymarket in late September, arguing it operates an unlicensed gambling business without a state gaming license. Polymarket countersued hours later, arguing the CFTC already has exclusive federal authority over these markets, so state gambling law should not apply at all. Kumar has said the company tried to resolve the dispute privately first and that the state “preferred the media hit” instead.
New York had already filed a similar case against Kalshi months earlier, so Polymarket’s lawsuit is really the second round of the same argument. We broke down the mechanics of that first case in our look at Kalshi’s New York fight, and the legal theory New York is using against both platforms is almost identical.
A Bigger Fight Is Already at the Supreme Court
New York is only one front. New Jersey has asked the Supreme Court to decide, once and for all, whether states can enforce their own gambling laws against prediction markets or whether federal commodities law wipes that power out. A bipartisan coalition of roughly 39 state attorneys general, led by Ohio, filed a brief backing New Jersey’s position, and the New Jersey attorney general’s office said directly that the court needs to resolve states’ authority over sports-related prediction contracts. The NFL then filed its own brief days later, arguing sports contracts expose people to outcomes they have no financial stake in, which is a textbook description of gambling rather than a hedge.
This is the exact question we examined in our piece on why Kalshi won’t bet on its own Supreme Court case while Polymarket will. Kumar’s letter and the state attorneys general brief are arguing opposite sides of the same underlying question: does a federal agency with a shrinking headcount get to be the only regulator here, or do all fifty states get a say.
Why the CFTC Side of the Argument Is Getting Weaker
Part of what makes Kumar’s “let the CFTC handle it” argument harder to sell right now is the CFTC itself. Staffing at the agency dropped 21% below its ten-year average by the end of 2025, and enforcement actions fell nearly 80% compared with the prior decade’s annual average, according to NPR’s reporting on the agency. We covered the related exemption fight in our explainer on the CLARITY Act and Polymarket’s US legal status, which touches on the same jurisdictional gap states are now trying to fill.
What This Actually Means for Traders
None of this changes how Polymarket works today. US residents in states that already block the platform are still blocked, and the countersuit against New York will take months, not days, to resolve. What the letter signals is a shift in strategy. Instead of only fighting lawsuits quietly in court, Polymarket is now making its legal argument in public, in a major newspaper, aimed at regulators and the people who write about them.
If the Supreme Court agrees to hear New Jersey’s case, the ruling could decide whether all fifty states get to write their own rules for platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, or whether one federal agency keeps that job alone. Kumar’s letter was written for that audience as much as for the public searching his name today.
