Kalshi CEO says state-led oversight of U.S. prediction markets would push them offshore

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour told DC Fintech Week that the real fight is not state oversight versus federal oversight, but whether prediction markets remain in the U.S. at all. For high-risk operators, the point is obvious: when the regulatory perimeter is unclear, the business model starts shopping for a more hospitable jurisdiction.

1. Speaking Wednesday in Arlington, Va., Mansour said, “We feel pretty good about where we stand overall,” but warned that if U.S. courts side with states that claim gambling authority over prediction markets, firms will be forced offshore. His framing was blunt: “It’s not a choice of state versus federal market. It’s a choice of whether prediction markets exist in the U.S. or whether they go offshore.”
2. Kalshi sits at the center of a legal fight over whether prediction markets are regulated as federally supervised financial contracts or as state-level gambling products. A growing list of states has challenged Kalshi and other firms in court, accusing them of illegal sports wagering under state gambling regulators, while Kalshi and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission argue the federal agency should be the sole watchdog.
3. The dispute has already reached several federal appellate courts, and the split is now visible: one major ruling has gone in Kalshi’s favor, while two have backed the states’ position. New Jersey has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, and outside groups, including the National Football League, have weighed in.
4. Mansour also pushed back on the argument that sports betting lacks the kind of economic consequence needed to justify federal treatment. “The notion that sports does not have economic consequence is ludicrous,” he said. For PSPs and platforms in adjacent verticals, that is the real issue: once a product is treated as financial rather than gambling, the compliance stack, regulator, and counterparty expectations change with it.
5. On Kalshi’s legal footing, Mansour said he has considered the company’s regulatory structure since the beginning and that it “really elegantly fit under definitions of commodity.” He also called the Commodity Exchange Act a “truly beautiful statue” that enabled markets to move from agricultural futures to oil and metals and then to less tangible products like swaps.

Mansour also addressed questions about alleged inflated trading volumes in bitcoin and ether perpetual-futures markets on Kalshi, saying there is “a lot of crazy” on X, formerly Twitter. The discussion centered on recurring trade sizes that accounted for a significant portion of Kalshi’s volume, which he said were tied to fixed-size orders from a market maker.