Kalshi asks SEC to pause Cboe binary options on earnings contracts

Kalshi wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission this month asking the commission to delay Cboe Global Markets from launching binary options contracts tied to specific corporate earnings line items, according to a Bloomberg report published Tuesday.

The request targets products Cboe has proposed that would compete directly with event contracts Kalshi already offers. The move inverts a dispute that ran the other direction for most of the past two years, during which Cboe and CME Group argued that CFTC had approved Kalshi's own products too quickly.

Cboe CEO Craig Donohue sharpened that argument at a CFTC roundtable last week, telling the commission it had assumed responsibility for products that should be classified as securities and regulated by the SEC. Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara was also present. She and CME CEO Terry Duffy clashed over whether scale and staff count are meaningful proxies for market integrity.

The jurisdictional boundary between CFTC and SEC is now the operative fault line. Kalshi's letter to the SEC implicitly concedes that some prediction market products belong in the securities framework — a concession that strengthens the case of incumbents who have made exactly that argument, and complicates Kalshi's broader posture before the CFTC.