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Jeff Le Riche

Jeff counsels financial institutions, trading firms, and market participants across a broad range of asset classes, including futures, swaps, foreign currency, digital assets, commodities, and securities. He represents clients in civil and criminal government investigations and enforcement actions, internal investigations, litigation, and regulatory compliance matters.

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On September 15, 2026, the Senate fell four votes short of the 60 needed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (the CLARITY Act). Within 48 hours, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) both took steps to regulate digital assets using the authority they already have. The message for companies in this space is simple: without new legislation from Congress, the agencies plan to build the rules for digital asset markets themselves.

On October 7, 2026, United States Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald issued Directive 26-13, “A Comprehensive Approach in the Fight Against Fraud,” (Comprehensive Approach Memo) to all personnel in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Fraud Enforcement Division. The directive builds on the National Fraud Enforcement Division’s August 13, 2026, enforcement-priorities memorandum and describes how prosecutors are to use asset seizure, forfeiture, and civil injunctive tools against fraud proceeds. Read alongside a string of recent DOJ forfeiture actions, the directive describes early pursuit of assets as a priority area, rather than a step reserved for later in a criminal case.

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On September 28, 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (the CFTC or Commission) submitted two proposed rules to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) that would further define the term “swap” under the Commodity Exchange Act to resolve the question of whether event contracts traded on prediction market platforms fall within the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction.

On October 9, 2026, following OIRA review, the CFTC published both rules. The first, an Interim Final Rule (IFR) excluding casino-style gambling products from the swap definition, took effect immediately upon publication. The second, a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would further define “swap” to include event contracts, was published for public comment. The filings are the latest step in the CFTC’s broader strategy of using its existing statutory authority to settle regulatory questions that Congress has so far left unresolved, and they arrive as state regulators, federal courts, and now potentially the Supreme Court continue to contest who has the final say over prediction markets.

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Our prior post tracked how the prediction markets fight had expanded beyond the federal preemption dispute between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the states into municipal consumer protection ordinances, legislative investigations, and consolidated consumer class actions. A new filing, Farias v. Kalshi Inc., No. 1CCV-26-0001429 (Haw. 1st Cir. Ct. filed Oct. 1, 2026), adds a further theory to that list: rather than asking a court to decide whether sports event contracts are federally regulated derivatives, it asks whether transactions procured through allegedly deceptive legality claims can be voided outright under state consumer protection law.

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On September 24, 2026, the Federal Reserve Board requested public comment on two proposed rules implementing the Fed’s responsibilities under the GENIUS Act, establishing a regulatory framework for Board-supervised payment stablecoin issuers. The GENIUS Act, enacted in July 2025, established the first federal regulatory framework for dollar-backed cryptocurrency tokens known as stablecoins. For banks and bank holding companies evaluating whether to enter the stablecoin market, the proposals may be among the clearest signals yet of the operational, capital, and application requirements they could face.

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On September 30, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit revived a putative securities fraud class action against Ocugen, Inc., a small, publicly traded pharmaceutical company, holding that a stock’s rapid price recovery after a corrective disclosure cannot, on its own, prove that an earlier misstatement was immaterial. In re Ocugen, Inc. Securities Litigation, No. 25-2653 (3d Cir. Sept. 30, 2026). The decision abrogates what the court itself labeled the “Oran-Burlington rule,” a line of Third Circuit precedent stretching back nearly 30 years. For practitioners defending or bringing Section 10(b) claims in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or Delaware federal courts, the ruling removes a familiar tool from the motion-to-dismiss toolkit and replaces it with a more fact-intensive materiality inquiry.

On September 30, 2026, the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law hosted the inaugural Heartland Government Enforcement & Investigations Conference. The day-long program brought together federal prosecutors, judges, state regulators, in-house counsel, and private practitioners across seven substantive sessions spanning DOJ enforcement priorities, federal sentencing and discovery practice, healthcare fraud, legal ethics and artificial intelligence, state antitrust enforcement, internal investigations, and securities and commodities regulation. Below is a summary of each session.

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Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have filed criminal complaints against two former Robinhood Markets, Inc. engineers, alleging they used confidential information about upcoming cryptocurrency listings on Robinhood Crypto to trade profitably on Hyperliquid, an offshore decentralized derivatives exchange. The scheme came to light after Robinhood conducted an internal investigation and referred the matter to law enforcement. The cases illustrate an emerging enforcement priority: prosecutors are extending traditional insider-trading theories to decentralized, unregistered derivatives markets.

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On September 11, 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or Commission) approved a final rule adding a new Rule 165.9(d) to the Commission’s whistleblower regulations, creating what the agency calls the “30 Percent Presumption.” Under the presumption, when a whistleblower’s total award would be $5 million or less and none of the rule’s disqualifying conditions apply, the Commission will presume the claimant should receive the full 30 percent statutory maximum—effectively defaulting to the highest possible payout for the smaller matters that make up the bulk of the CFTC’s whistleblower docket. The Commission’s release explains that, subject to Commission discretion and its analysis of relevant regulatory factors, the final rule incorporates this presumption for whistleblower awards of $5 million or less. The rule is modeled on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rule 21F-6(c), a step the Commission describes as further enhancing the ongoing efforts at harmonization between the two agencies.