Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who also serves as Senate president, ordered Senate committees to study and review prediction markets and cryptocurrency and blockchain issues as top priorities for the next legislative session.

Cointelegraph reported on March 31 that Patrick's office issued the Texas Senate committees' 2026 interim charges and ordered advance reviews ahead of the next session, which begins in January next year.

Patrick instructed that prediction markets be addressed from the perspective of loopholes in gambling regulation. The task document refers to a "sudden flood of prediction market gambling" and specifies that the review should examine ways to close gambling loopholes, including whether federal law is being used to bypass Texas' ban on election-related gambling.

In the cryptocurrency area, it directed, as part of a financial technology task, that Texas assess "coordination" with federal regulations related to crypto and blockchain. It also instructed a review of crypto kiosks in the state.

In other states, lawsuits have continued against prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket over sports and election betting, but Texas has not yet joined. Texas has strict sports betting and gambling rules, and gambling is largely limited to tribal reservation casinos and the state lottery system, among other channels.

The Texas Legislature meets every 2 years, and the next regular session is scheduled to run for 140 days starting in January 2027. In the 2025 session, a bill to establish a Bitcoin reserve was introduced, and Governor Greg Abbott signed it into law in June.

Patrick also set as a research task the implications of artificial intelligence technology for the Texas labor market and for economic competitiveness.

Separately, as reports said a plan to build a $5 billion data center leased by Google to Anthropic is under way, Texas is expected to continue policy discussions linked to expanding investment in AI and high-performance computing.