Texas Tells Lawmakers: Your Summer Reading List Is Crypto, Prediction Markets, and AI

Dan Patrick, Texas Lieutenant Governor and President of the Senate, has officially added crypto and blockchain to the state's legislative homework assignment for 2026. In a Friday announcement, Patrick's office released interim charges for Texas Senate committees to chew on ahead of the next legislative session kicking off in January. Think of it as summer reading, but instead of beach novels, lawmakers get to dive into whitepapers and argue about whether Satoshi was actually a Texan.

The charges aim to 'advance the priorities of Texas' conservative majority,' which apparently now includes taking a hard look at prediction markets and digital assets. Gone are the days when "conservative priorities" meant just tax cuts and prayer in school—now there's a slot for your favorite volatile assets too. The Lone Star State is apparently ready to ride both the Bitcoin bull and the prediction market circus.

On the gambling front, Patrick wants lawmakers to explore 'closing gambling loopholes' by studying 'the sudden inundation of prediction market gambling and the exploitation of federal law to circumvent Texas gambling prohibitions' on elections. Texas currently has some of the tightest gambling restrictions in the country, limited mainly to Native American casinos and the state lottery. Nothing says "small government" like the state telling you whether you can bet on whether it'll rain in Austin next Tuesday.

For the fintech portion, the Lieutenant Governor called for an evaluation of how Texas coordinates with federal crypto and blockchain rules, plus a closer look at those crypto kiosks popping up around the Lone Star state. Yes, those mysterious machines in gas stations that your uncle swears are a government conspiracy to track his Bitcoin purchases. The state wants to know if they're actually legit or just elaborate money-laundering machines with LED displays.

Other states have been suing prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket over sports and election wagers, but Texas hadn't joined that party as of Tuesday. Texas is apparently taking the "wait and see" approach—like the friend who shows up to the party an hour late but brings better beer. Or at least, that's what we're telling ourselves.

The Texas legislature meets every two years and returns for a 140-day session in January 2027. In the 2025 session, lawmakers passed a Bitcoin reserve bill that Governor Greg Abbott signed into law in June. For those keeping score at home, yes, Texas now has an actual Bitcoin reserve. The hodlers in Austin are probably already designing the state flag with an orange laser-eyed longhorn.

Also on the agenda: studying AI's impact on the Texas workforce and economic competitiveness. That notice dropped just as reports surfaced that Google backs a multibillion-dollar data center in Texas leased to Anthropic, a project expected to exceed $5 billion initially. Nothing says "AI is coming for your jobs" quite like a $5 billion data center setting up shop in your state. The robots aren't just coming to Texas—they're building a whole damn compound.

Meanwhile, many US mining companies are pivoting to AI and high-performance computing as mining difficulty climbs and crypto prices soften. Because nothing says "falling knife" quite like a Bitcoin miner looking at their electricity