The city of Baltimore sued Kalshi and Polymarket this week. It says their sports contracts are unlicensed gambling with a nicer name on the door.

That is the third front in a month. New York's attorney general sued Kalshi on July 31 on the same argument and asked for an order that would have stopped it taking event contracts anywhere in the country. The federal regulator stepped in on Tuesday and told Kalshi to keep trading. That was the second time this summer it has used emergency powers to do that, after Michigan in July. New York went to a federal appeals court and told the judges the CFTC does not get to claim sole authority here.

Then the New York City Council opened its own investigation into how these places advertise. It grew out of a Wall Street Journal review in June of around 1,100 Polymarket promotional videos. More than 70% of them showed trades placed on a fake version of the site. Kalshi, Coinbase and Gemini were pulled into the same inquiry. They have fourteen business days to answer.

Now the other half of the same week. The White House is bringing crypto and prediction-market executives in on Wednesday. Gemini's prediction-market volume nearly doubled in its latest results. Polymarket hired the whole sports team out of a rival called Turf. Kalshi signed up Nasdaq's surveillance arm to watch its own markets for insider trading.

The same companies are in three courtrooms and on a White House guest list, and they are growing faster than either fight is moving.

Prediction markets have become the front door to crypto for a lot of ordinary people who never wanted a wallet, and the odds further down this page come out of them. If the states win their argument, that door closes in some places and stays open in others, and the prices you read get thinner along with it.

A company called ShipMonk packs and posts Trezor hardware wallets. It was breached, and the order details of 13,689 Trezor customers across seven countries went with it.

The devices are fine. Trezor says its own systems were never touched and no coins are at risk. What is out in the world is names, addresses and what people bought.

That is enough. Anyone holding that list knows who owns a hardware wallet and where they live. Expect very convincing emails and calls about your wallet over the next few weeks, and treat every one of them as fake.

It is also the loudest thing in crypto today. "Trezor" is the top trending word in the social feeds. Fourth on that list is "wrench", the kind of robbery where somebody knocks on your door. It sits right beside "attack", "wallet" and "seed".

Tether has been the biggest dollar in crypto for years and had never once been through a full independent audit. This week it was. KPMG's US arm signed an unqualified opinion on Tether's 2025 accounts, which is the clean verdict auditors give when they find nothing wrong. The work reportedly included somebody going to physically look at the gold.

For an issuer that spent a decade answering questions about what actually sits behind its coins, that is the milestone.

The reaction split down the middle. Sentiment on the news came in at exactly 50% bullish and 50% bearish, with the bear half pointing out that the reserve cushion has shrunk since those accounts closed.

The dollar most people park money in between trades is better evidenced today than it has ever been, and the price of everything else did not move a cent on the news.