Kalshi will let you put money on a Hawaiʻi hurricane, a Trump speech or Tuesday’s midterms. Hawaiʻi’s House voted this year to ban markets like those, and since July, the company’s poured a lot of money into Democrats in Hawaiʻi.
Kalshi is a prediction market. Each contract is a yes-or-no question, and if you’re right, it pays $1. A federal agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, oversees it as an exchange, and Kalshi argues state gambling laws. That’s why it has been allowed to operate in Hawaiʻi, where gambling is illegal, as Civil Beat’s Madeleine Valera reported in July.
But in its own ads, Kalshi has been more candid. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Hawaiʻi, noted in August that the company “advertises itself as ‘the first app for legal sports betting in all 50 states’” and ruled against it in a fight with Nevada.
Two other federal appeals courts have split on the same question, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has sued 10 states to stop them from enforcing their own laws against exchanges like Kalshi.
