A federal judge in New York has hit pause on a civil lawsuit brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission(CFTC), putting the case on ice until a separate criminal prosecution over the same conduct plays out.District Judge Andrew Carter of the Southern District of New York signed off on the stay Monday, siding with federal prosecutors who had asked for the delay back in July. The Justice Department argued that letting the civil and criminal cases move forward on parallel tracks risked stepping on each other’s toes, given that both hinge on the same evidence, the same witnesses, and many of the same legal issues.At the center of both cases is Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a Master Sergeant with US Army Special Forces. Authorities say Van Dyke pocketed north of $400,000 trading Polymarket event contracts that were tied to whether Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro would be removed from power. The Justice Department has tied Van Dyke to the broader US operation aimed at pushing Maduro out in January, and prosecutors allege he leveraged inside knowledge from that operation to place winning bets on the prediction market before the outcome became public.Van Dyke’s legal team pushed back against the government’s request, telling the court he wanted to mount a defense in the civil and criminal matters simultaneously rather than let one sit idle. Judge Carter wasn’t persuaded, ultimately deciding that freezing the CFTC’s civil action while the criminal case runs its course was the more sensible path. Separately, Van Dyke has already moved to have the criminal indictment thrown out altogether, and he’s doing so on multiple fronts. One of his central arguments is that it’s far from settled whether the CFTC even has authority to regulate prediction-market event contracts as “swaps” in the first place, a question he’s framed as legally murky rather than clear-cut. This argument taps into a unresolved debate in the crypto and prediction-market world over how far the CFTC’s jurisdiction extends when it comes to platforms like Polymarket, where users trade on the outcomes of real-world political and geopolitical events.With the civil case shelved, all eyes now turn to the criminal proceeding, where Van Dyke’s motion to dismiss is still pending. StockPoint Review – Is it Safe or Legit?Bitsonic CEO Arrested for Alleged $7.5M User Fund Theft in South KoreaBest 10 Chatbot Builders to Boost Your SalesBitcoin dumps $2,400 after setting $67,000 high| Bitcoin News