Kalshi is putting a hefty bet on its legal wrangling as the prediction markets firm fights for its survival in the potentially existential question: Are its users gambling or purchasing derivatives?
The leading U.S. prediction markets business and the rest of the rapidly growing event-contract industry, which has been making a big public splash in marketing and advertising to disrupt sports betting in the same way that ride-share services did to taxi drivers, still needs definitive U.S. court rulings to cement its legal footing. Having the federal derivatives regulator on its side may help, but it's currently combating states across the country, with the latest dispute seeing court action in Minnesota on Thursday.
While lawyers for the industry and Minnesota made oral arguments in Kalshi's bid to halt the state's decision to ban prediction markets as illegal activity, other legal pots were also boiling over.
In the Nevada Supreme Court, Kalshi lost an effort a few days ago to halt a requirement that it block its customers in the state from much of the platform's trading activity. The denial signed by three state justices on Wednesday said they were "not persuaded" by the business' emergency motion, and Kalshi may also face legal trouble for failing to geofence its business by a court-imposed deadline.
In Ohio, Kalshi sued the gaming regulator on Monday — following earlier, parallel court arguments from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — seeking to halt Ohio's penalty against the company on accusations it's run an unlicensed sports-betting operation.
The next day, a local court in Michigan granted that state's gaming regulators a temporary, two-week restraining order against Kalshi to stop it from offering, advertising or facilitating sports betting there.
"Kalshi is targeting Michigan's most vulnerable residents with sports betting dressed up as investing — and without intervention, the harm will keep getting worse,” said Michigan Gaming Control Board Executive Director Henry Williams in a Tuesday statement.
On the positive side for prediction platforms: The CFTC and its pro-innovation chairman, Mike Selig, are aggressively trying to make the case that Kalshi and the others belong under the sole jurisdiction of the agency as the U.S. derivatives regulator, arguing in its own lawsuits against several states that the contracts sold in the prediction markets are effectively the same as those an agricultural business might buy to hedge against future crop prices changes.
"While states waste taxpayer dollars defending casino and sportsbook monopolies, Kalshi is fighting for consumers' right to a fairer, more transparent market," said Jacki McGavick, in a statement emailed to CoinDesk. "We will keep defending Americans' access wherever it's challenged."
Alongside the battle over jurisdiction, other states are seeing the tax revenue potential from the explosive jump in prediction market popularity. North Carolina's legislature is poised to put a final approval on a state budget bill that would apply a 6% tax on revenue from that activity while simultaneously hiking up the tax on gaming at sportsbooks to a much higher level — establishing a formal division between the rival methods of placing bets on the outcome of sporting events.
And New Jersey was among other states in the thick of pursuing new tax regimes on prediction markets, but as the state tried to put such firms in the same legal bucket as sports gambling operations, Kalshi fought back and secured a legal pause from a federal court that found the CFTC probably had jurisdiction. That dispute is in the process of being elevated toward the U.S. Supreme Court, with New Jersey officially filing recently with the high court to request more time in that appeal process.
"This issue is tremendously important: The Third Circuit majority’s conclusion — that sports bets fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Commodity Exchange Act and that the Act preempts state regulation of these sports bets—would federalize a multibillion-dollar-a-year sports-wagering industry at the expense of every state law in the country," New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum wrote in the extension application.
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