Massachusetts federal court grants Kalshi sports contract injunction

A Massachusetts federal judge has approved a preliminary injunction against Kalshi, blocking the platform from operating sports event contracts in the state while litigation proceeds — and the ruling lands at a moment when Kalshi's legal map is shrinking faster than its legal team can redraw it.

The injunction is not a final judgment. Kalshi will argue that point, and correctly. But preliminary injunctions require a showing of likelihood of success on the merits, and a federal judge in Massachusetts looked at that standard and decided the state clears it. That is the part worth sitting with.

The Ninth Circuit already ruled that Kalshi's event contracts constitute illegal sports betting on tribal lands. The Montana standstill — where Kalshi dropped its lawsuit in exchange for a pause in enforcement pending a rehearing petition — is a procedural holding pattern, not a win. Connecticut's Department of Consumer Protection has issued cease-and-desist orders to nine platforms, including Kalshi's rivals, and Underdog has filed a 39-page federal complaint arguing CFTC preemption is the only legal framework that matters. The preemption argument is the same one Kalshi has been running. Underdog is testing whether it survives a different circuit, a different judge, a different fact pattern.

Here is where I break from the consensus read: most of the commentary treats these state actions as a coordination problem — if enough states move, Congress or the CFTC will be forced to clarify. I don't think that's where this lands. What these injunctions and cease-and-desist orders are actually building is a factual record that courts in multiple jurisdictions are finding against Kalshi on the merits, not just on jurisdictional grounds. By the time a preemption argument reaches a circuit that matters, it will be arguing against a body of district and appellate decisions that say the underlying conduct is a bet. Preemption doesn't save you if what you're doing is already illegal under federal law as construed by the Ninth Circuit.

The CFTC's continued silence — no rulemaking, no formal guidance, no public position on what constitutes a permissible event contract — is not helping Kalshi. Kalshi's core argument is that CFTC authorization is a shield. But a shield requires someone to be holding it. The agency's absence from these proceedings, while platforms fight state by state, means each court is writing its own answer to the question the CFTC has refused to answer. Some of those answers will survive appeal. Some will compound each other.

Underdog's lawsuit in Connecticut is the one to watch structurally. It is the clearest test of whether a DCM designation, on its own, creates a preemption argument that federal courts will enforce without CFTC backup. Kalshi's version of that argument lost in the Ninth Circuit. The platform that wins a different circuit first will reframe the whole landscape.