Sean Patrick Maloney's Vanishing Ethics Pledge

The former member of Congress and DCCC chair is now the head of the Coalition for Prediction Markets, an organization funded by the exact crypto firms he promised not to work for.

https://prospect.org/2026/01/15/sean-patrick-maloney-ethics-crypto-prediction-markets/


Former Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) in 2022. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

In February 2024, former Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), then-nominee for U.S. representative to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), faced pointed questions in a Senate hearing about his ties to cryptocurrency companies, and how that might affect his decision-making in his new role. Under pressure from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (and the Prospect), Maloney agreed to immediately resign from his private-sector work with cryptocurrency firms and commit to “not accept employment, board service or compensation from any crypto company or organization for four years after his OECD tenure.”

Tuesday morning, just one year after leaving the OECD, Maloney announced a new position that appears to violate this commitment. He will now be the president and CEO of the Coalition for Prediction Markets (CPM), an industry trade and lobbying group for the so-called prediction market industry. Among the group’s five “members” that fund the operation are Crypto.com and Coinbase, the latter being the very same cryptocurrency company that inspired Maloney’s ethics pledge to begin with.

A former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Maloney was once viewed as one of the party’s rising stars, leading the House Democratic caucus’s campaign arm, a position that often serves as a stepping stone to higher positions in House leadership. But in 2022, Maloney lost re-election in a New York district that Joe Biden had won by double digits just two years before, despite Democrats fighting the GOP nearly to a draw across the rest of the country. His loss, attributed by some to his alienation of local Democratic groups and taking a European fundraising trip just weeks before Election Day, was considered by election analysts as one of the most shocking upsets of the midterms.

The next May, just four months after being pushed out of office, Maloney turned that insider cachet into a job with the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase. Maloney was not forced to settle for mere private-sector employment for long, as the former congressman was tapped by President Biden to represent the U.S. at the OECD—on the very same day that Coinbase announced his role on their “Global Advisory Council.” In his role as the U.S. representative to the OECD, Maloney would be given the rank of ambassador, and be sent to Paris to represent the nation at the international body, which, among other things, happened to be working on developing regulatory frameworks pertaining to the cryptocurrency industry.

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