Kalshi is asking for a rehearing. The federal regulator with jurisdiction over the case has already said the original ruling got the law wrong.
Kalshi has petitioned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for an en banc rehearing of an August 28 ruling by a three-judge panel that sided with the state of Nevada in a dispute over whether sports-event prediction contracts fall under federal, rather than state, gambling jurisdiction. The petition argues the panel's decision creates a circuit split and contains reasoning that conflicts with the plain text of the Commodity Exchange Act. An en banc rehearing would involve eleven Ninth Circuit judges rather than the original three.
What makes this more than a routine appeal is that the federal regulator most directly implicated has already weighed in publicly, and unusually bluntly. On the day the panel ruling came down, a Commodity Futures Trading Commission spokesperson said on the record that "the Ninth Circuit erred today when it invented a new and atextual exception to the CEA," adding that the court "has now teed up a circuit split that calls out for resolution by the Supreme Court." A regulator criticizing a federal appeals court's reasoning in those terms is itself notable, independent of how the underlying legal dispute resolves.
The circuit split the CFTC referenced is real: a Third Circuit ruling in April sided with Kalshi's position, while the Ninth Circuit's August ruling went the other way. New Jersey's attorney general filed a Supreme Court cert petition on September 2 seeking resolution of that split; it remains pending.
A prediction market is now pricing that outcome directly. Traders on Polymarket have been reported estimating roughly a 45% probability the Supreme Court agrees to hear a sports-event-contract case by the end of 2026, a market-implied figure rather than an independently derived legal forecast.
Separately, Robinhood has said it plans to appeal the same Ninth Circuit ruling; whether that has advanced to an actual completed Supreme Court filing is unconfirmed.
For an industry whose largest platforms depend on federal, rather than state-by-state, regulatory treatment to operate their sports-event contracts nationally, a circuit split now publicly acknowledged by the CFTC itself, combined with a market pricing real odds of Supreme Court review, is a meaningfully different situation than an unresolved lower-court dispute drifting through the system.