This tracker is a demonstration of the output this platform is being built to deliver. It came out of an ungoverned dry run — sourcing and review only, with no policy enforcement, evaluation gates or publish controls. Nothing here is verified, and none of it is legal advice.
⚠ General legal information — not legal advice·Built by AI, governed and approved by a human; corrections welcome.·Updated 9 Aug 2026, 06:12 ET· Human-approved
About this page
1
Always currentA live record of U.S. prediction-market litigation — posture, operational status and primary source
for every tracked state, checked daily rather than written once.
2
Open-source governance, demonstratedBuilt and maintained by an autonomous system, mapped to the
nine-layer AI governance framework
Patrick proposed on LinkedIn. Every run, draft and approval is public on
ops.
Where prediction-market litigation actually stands.
One court of appeals says the federal exchange licence wins.
Six district courts say the states do. Nothing is settled, and the Supreme Court has not been asked yet
— the deadline is 3 September.
Unscientific — not evidence, not a forecast. The tracker's own cert reading is set by a named human. One vote per browser, stored locally.
The situation
What this fight is about
Written for readers who are not lawyers. Every claim below is carried in the case records
further down, each with a primary source.
A federally licensed exchange now sells contracts on who wins Sunday's game. Forty-eight
states call that a bet. Congress never said which one is right.
What a prediction market is
You buy a contract that pays out if a stated event happens — a candidate wins, inflation lands above a
number, a team covers. Kalshi, Polymarket US, Crypto.com and Robinhood Derivatives run these as federally
regulated exchanges, licensed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission the same way a soybean futures
market is licensed.
What changed
The contracts moved to sports. For most of their history these markets tracked
economic events, and nobody objected. In early 2025 the platforms began listing contracts on sporting
events.
Gaming regulators saw a sportsbook. A contract that pays out when the Titans win is
a sports bet under any state definition — and sports betting is licensed, taxed and policed state by
state.
Nobody can point to a statute that resolves it. The state laws predate the federal
one by a century, and the federal one never mentions sports.
The legal question, in one sentence
The Commodity Exchange Act gives the CFTC “exclusive jurisdiction” over swaps and futures traded on
federally licensed exchanges.
The platforms say that language preempts state gambling law: if the CFTC licensed
the market, no state may shut it down.
The states say Congress wrote that statute to regulate financial derivatives after
the 2008 crisis, not to strip states of a police power they have held for a century — and that a bet on
a football game is not a swap in any meaningful sense.
How the states are enforcing
By every tool they have, often several at once in the same state.
Cease-and-desist orders. Gaming boards order the platforms to stop, on penalty of
unlicensed-gaming charges.
State-court suits. Attorneys general sue at home, where platforms have repeatedly
failed to move the case into federal court.
Criminal charges. Arizona filed twenty misdemeanor counts — the first criminal
prosecution of a CFTC-registered operator.
Statutes and taxes. Minnesota passed an outright ban; Kentucky wrote a 14.25% excise
tax and barred licensed sportsbooks from dealing with the platforms.
Tribal claims. Tribes have sued under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, arguing the
contracts cut into exclusivity they paid for.
And the federal government pushing back. Since April 2026 the CFTC has sued nine
states in its own name.
Why this tracker exists
The answer depends on the courthouse. One appellate ruling says preempted; final
judgments and denials in Utah, New York, Wisconsin, Ohio, Maryland and Nevada say otherwise.
It changes most weeks. Four of the nineteen states below moved in the last month.
Compliance needs the order, not the headline. Every status here links to the ruling
that makes it true.
2023–24
Kalshi beats the CFTC over election contracts in federal court. The agency drops its appeal. Election
markets go live.
Early 2025
Sports event contracts launch. Nevada, then a wave of other gaming regulators, issue cease-and-desist
orders.
Late 2025
Maryland becomes the first federal court to side with a state. Nevada dissolves its own earlier
injunction: these are not swaps.
Apr 2026
The Third Circuit rules for Kalshi in Flaherty — still the only federal appellate decision on
the merits.
Spring 2026
The CFTC starts suing states. Arizona charges Kalshi criminally. Minnesota bans prediction markets
outright.
Summer 2026
Utah enters final judgment for the state; New York and Wisconsin deny relief; Minnesota's ban is
enjoined. Six circuits now hold appeals.
A1 · Heat map
The circuit split
Geography and doctrine disagree. The map colors states by the posture that controls them;
the index colors the courts of appeals. Select either — the other follows.
Posture
Circuit
Layer|Entities
Controlling posture by stateUpdated 9 Aug 2026
Map geometry could not be loaded. The circuit index and the state board carry the
same postures — this view is a second reading of the same record, never the only one.
Courts of appeals7 of 13 with tracked activity
A2 · Status board
State by state
Operational status answers the compliance question — can this platform take the order in this
state today. Posture answers where the law is heading. They are not the same field, and they can disagree.
Status
Controlling case
Every status and posture cell above links to at least one Tier‑1 source in the state panel.
States with no tracked activity are absent from this table rather than shown as neutral — absence is not a finding.
A2b · Issue map
What is actually being litigated
Every matter carries a controlling issue and its secondary issues, drawn from a fixed
vocabulary. Click anything below: the panel names the matters, and the case record further down filters
to match.
Issue × postureHow each issue has actually come out. Depth of tone is the count, not the outcome —
the outcome is the column.
When each issue entered the recordOne mark per matter, placed at its first docket event. Colour is that matter's posture
today.
This timeline needs a wide screen to read. Open the tracker on a laptop for the full view — the case records below carry the same first-docket dates.
Frequency, split by posturePreemption is pleaded almost everywhere; the state-law theories are where the losses
are.
Issue familiesThe vocabulary itself: five families, the tags inside each, and one segment per
matter on the outer ring — hover a segment to name it.
The issue-family sunburst needs a wide screen. On a phone, use the issue bars above — same vocabulary, same counts.
A3 · Case record
Cases
One record per case, one posture per case. If a state and a circuit disagree on screen,
that is a data error — report it.
A3b · Entity record
Platforms and parties
The same order can reach one platform and not another. This view reads the record the other
way round — by who is actually bound.
A4 · Qualitative signal
Certiorari likelihood
Qualitative only. No market-derived number ships in v1 — the space below the reading is
deliberately held open for one, with its methodology and its reflexivity caveat.
Reading
Elevated
Remote · Low · Elevated · Likely · Near-certain
A qualitative editorial reading of the factors at right. It is not a probability, and it is not derived
from any market.
Human-approvedReviewed 9 Aug 2026
Reserved: market-derived cert probability (Kalshi / Robinhood), with methodology
and reflexivity caveat. Not shipped in v1.
Factors named in this reading
1Only appellate merits holding on the core question.Flaherty remains the sole court of appeals decision reaching CEA preemption on the merits.
Nothing yet splits against it at the appellate level.
2A deep district-court split underneath it.
Utah, New York, Wisconsin, Ohio, Maryland and Nevada rejected preemption or denied relief; Arizona,
Tennessee and Minnesota went the other way. Six circuits hold appeals from that record.
3New Jersey timing. The certiorari deadline has been
extended twice, to 3 September 2026. No petition had been filed as of 9 August.
4Two bellwethers outstanding. The Ninth Circuit
(argued 16 April) and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (argued 4 May) could each reframe the
question before any petition is conferenced.
5The federal government is a party. The CFTC has sued
nine states in its own name, which raises the odds of a government filing at the petition stage.
Factors are the whole method. There is no weighting, no model and no score behind this reading —
if a factor changes, the reading is re-argued in the open and the change appears as a draft on
ops. before it appears here.
A5 / A6 · Provenance
How this page is made
Not legal advice. This site publishes general legal information about pending
litigation. Reading it creates no attorney-client relationship, and nothing here is a substitute for
counsel licensed in your jurisdiction.
Built by AI, approved by a human. Every row on this page was drafted by an
autonomous pipeline and published only after a named human cleared the Approval Gate. The gate is
currently set to HITL; autonomous mode is off. Each published item carries its provenance label at the
point of use, frozen at publish time.
Drafts are not here. Proposed changes — including two pending right now — live in
full on ops., labelled not live. The tracker never renders an unapproved draft.
⚠ This opens a public GitHub issue. Everything you type here — including your name and contact — is
visible to anyone. Leave both blank to file anonymously.
Corrections are filed as public issues in the repository. You get a tracking ID immediately —
e.g. PML‑C‑2026‑0184 — and the resulting draft, approved or rejected, is visible on
ops. with its reason attached.
The other half of the system
ops.predictionmarketlitigation.com
The run log, full evidence for every run, the pending drafts in full text, the current approval mode
and its audit trail, and the nine-layer governance explainer. No login. If you want to check whether this
tracker deserves the trust it asks for, that is where you check.
