Kalshi pushes back on CFTC’s emergency motion on election betting
Prediction market platform accuses regulator of causing “irreparable harm” for attempting to prevent the listing of election betting contracts for another 14 days
Kalshi has branded the Commodity Future Trading Commission’s (CFTC) emergency motion to prevent it from listing election betting contracts for 14 days as “meritless.”
On Sunday, in the latest twist in the ongoing tussle, the New York-based prediction market site moved to push back against the regulator after seemingly securing a victory in the case last week.
The CFTC had prohibited Kalshi from listing contracts on which party would control each house of Congress after November’s presidential election, claiming such activity would amount to unlawful gaming.
However, the company later sued the agency, calling its decision “arbitrary [and] capricious.”
In a ruling handed out last Friday, Judge Jia M Cobb sided with Kalshi without giving her rationale, prompting the CFTC to file an emergency motion just hours later.
In the motion, the regulator claimed that it was not yet able to determine whether it should appeal the decision and was therefore requesting that Cobb stay her order until two weeks following the publication of the opinion.
However, Kalshi has since hit back at CFTC, stating that any delay would cause “irreparable harm” to the company given that its future depends on being able to list election betting contracts while there was still time before Americans go to the polls on November 5.
It told the US District Court for the District of Columbia: “The delay – which the agency would assuredly try to parlay into another, then another, until it’s too late – would be devastating for Kalshi, which has staked its future on this litigation and these markets.
“The public has already been denied these benefits for over a year while the CFTC’s unlawful order was in place. And with the election now fewer than 60 days away, there has never been a more important time for those benefits to materialise.”
Kalshi is currently the US’s only CFTC-regulated prediction market and settles all its trades in US dollars.
The firm claimed that as it had waited for the litigation process to run its course, unregulated operations such as Polymarket, last year’s breakout success story, have been able to take advantage of the delay and unfairly dominate the market.
Last month, a group of US senators and Congress members backed the CFTC’s proposed betting ban on future presidential elections.