Michigan court blocks Kalshi for residents as New Jersey asks the Supreme Court to step in

Michigan’s attorney general says a state court has issued a preliminary injunction against Kalshi, stopping the prediction markets platform from offering event contracts to state residents and exposing the company to fines of up to $500,000 per day. For PSPs and other high-risk payment players, the point is simple: the jurisdiction fight around prediction markets is now colliding with state-level enforcement, and the map is getting messier, not cleaner.

1. Attorney General Dana Nessel said the Circuit Court for the 30th Judicial Circuit in Ingham County approved the injunction in a Wednesday notice. Michigan officials described Kalshi’s model as “sports betting [...] masquerading as an investment opportunity,” and Nessel said the order protects residents from the platform’s “predatory, unlicensed practices.”
2. The order means Kalshi cannot offer event contracts to Michigan residents, and violations could trigger fines of up to $500,000 per day. That is not a theoretical compliance headache; it is the sort of number that forces a platform and its payment partners to look hard at access controls, resident screening, and state-by-state exposure.
3. This follows Michigan’s June restraining order, which had already barred Kalshi from offering sports betting to residents. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) then ordered Kalshi not to comply with the state order and to keep operating, which the company said put it in an “impossible position.”
4. Separately, New Jersey officials filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the US Supreme Court over their own case against Kalshi on the same day as the Michigan order. If the justices take the case, it could determine whether the CFTC or state authorities control prediction markets, and therefore whether states can ban or regulate sports event contracts on their own.
5. Melinda Roth, a visiting professor of practice at New England Law in Boston, told Cointelegraph that the Supreme Court may wait for merits decisions rather than rule on preliminary injunctions first, but she still expects the court to take the issue up given the amount of litigation. Lawmakers have also proposed legislation aimed at customers using insider information on event contracts.

For high-risk operators, the practical takeaway is that prediction markets are no longer just a regulatory novelty. When state courts, the CFTC, and the Supreme Court are all in the frame, payment flows tied to event contracts inherit the same uncertainty.