Michigan Court Orders Kalshi to Keep Blocking Sports Event Contracts
A Michigan circuit court has granted a preliminary injunction requiring Kalshi to continue blocking Michigan residents from its sports event contracts, extending a fight that's been building since state regulators first moved against the prediction-market platform earlier this year. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina of the 30th Judicial Circuit Court in Ingham County issued the order on September 2, following up on a temporary restraining order she'd granted back in June.
What the order requires
Under the injunction, Kalshi must stop offering sports prediction contracts and "functionally similar" products to Michigan residents, halt new account creation and funding tied to those products, end related advertising in the state, and use a Michigan Gaming Control Board-licensed geolocation service to keep the state properly geofenced. The court set a $500,000-per-day fine for non-compliance and required Kalshi to notify the futures commission merchants that route its trades — including Robinhood and PrizePicks — of the order.
The reasoning behind the ruling
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who filed the underlying suit in March, argued that Kalshi's sports contracts function as unlicensed sports betting under state law. The court's reasoning leaned heavily on consumer-protection grounds: Kalshi allows account holders as young as 18 to trade, well below Michigan's 21-plus threshold for online gambling, and the platform doesn't carry the patron-protection safeguards — like self-exclusion tools and problem-gambling protections — that licensed Michigan sportsbooks are required to build in. The court also cited lost gaming-tax revenue for schools, public safety programs, and Detroit's casino-tax base, along with impacts on tribal gaming revenue, as part of the public-interest case for the injunction. Nessel said the ruling "further protects Michigan residents" after Kalshi had "long attempted to pass itself off as a legitimate gaming operation" in the state.
Part of a bigger national fight
Michigan is one of several states now litigating against Kalshi's sports contracts, alongside cases already underway in New Jersey, Connecticut, Nevada, and Washington State — all wrestling with the same core question of whether CFTC-regulated event contracts on sports outcomes are federally protected financial products or state-regulated gambling in disguise. Kalshi has said it disagrees with the Michigan ruling and will continue fighting it in court, consistent with the company's approach in the other state cases working their way through the court system. For US bettors and traders, the practical takeaway is the same one that applies across every state currently in this dispute: platform availability for sports-related prediction contracts remains genuinely unsettled and can change abruptly as individual state rulings come down.