Susquehanna asks Ohio regulators to exempt market-makers from crackdown

The Ohio Casino Control Commission's October 30 compliance deadline has produced one confirmed submission — Plus500 — and a queue of negotiations that the regulator has described, with careful vagueness, as productive. What it has also produced, less visibly, is a structural problem the OCCC's cease-and-desist letters were not designed to solve.

Susquehanna International Group sits inside the Utah lawsuit as a named defendant, accused alongside Kalshi of taking fees from the more than 32,000 Utah residents who held verified accounts on the platform. The state's attorney general, Derek Brown, is seeking between $30.6 million and $61.2 million in allegedly unlawful profits and wants court-approved geolocation controls installed before any further trades clear. Susquehanna's role in that case is not as an operator. It is as a market-maker — the firm that stands between the contract and the price, providing liquidity that makes the exchange function.

That distinction matters more than the litigation framing suggests. The OCCC's guidance to Ohio licensees carves out firms operating as futures commission merchants or introducing brokers, provided they block Ohio customers from accessing sports event contracts directly or indirectly. The carve-out is narrow by design. It does not extend to market-making as a general activity, and it says nothing about the situation Susquehanna now faces in Utah, where state law prohibits virtually all forms of gambling and where the federal preemption argument Kalshi relied on has already failed at district court level and been denied an injunction on appeal.

The 10th Circuit's refusal to pause Utah's enforcement while Kalshi appeals is the operational fact that changes the terrain. The Third Circuit sided with Kalshi against New Jersey. The Sixth Circuit sided with Ohio. The 10th Circuit has not ruled on the merits, but its denial of injunctive relief signals something about where it assesses the probabilities. New Jersey has now asked the Supreme Court to resolve the split, with a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general behind the petition.

The consensus read is that Supreme Court review is likely and that Kalshi's federal preemption argument will eventually get a definitive hearing. The consensus may be right about the destination and wrong about what happens in the interval. State enforcement does not pause for certiorari petitions. Utah's lawsuit is in state court now, with named defendants, a dollar figure attached, and a request for geolocation controls that, if granted, would require Kalshi to build infrastructure that treats Utah the way it currently treats no state.

What the OCCC's licensee notice makes explicit is that the enforcement perimeter is widening. The commission is not only pursuing the exchanges. It is reaching the firms that provide liquidity, integrity monitoring, and technology services to those exchanges — the infrastructure layer that makes prediction markets operable. Susquehanna's presence in the Utah complaint is the clearest signal that state regulators have read the market-maker's role correctly and intend to price it accordingly.

The question that Kalshi's preemption argument never fully answered is whether federal jurisdiction over the contract itself extends to every firm that touches the contract downstream. Utah's complaint suggests the state's answer is no. Ohio's licensee guidance arrives at something similar from a different angle.

Kalshi's spokesperson has said no single state should have a veto over a federally regulated derivatives market. That position is legally coherent and strategically correct as a long-run argument. The short run looks like this: two simultaneous enforcement actions, one named market-maker, a compliance deadline that has produced one voluntary submission, and a Supreme Court petition that has not yet been accepted.