Michigan judge blocks Kalshi from letting residents place sports bets

A Michigan court has temporarily barred Kalshi from offering sports event contracts to residents of the state, after the attorney general said the platform was running an unlicensed gambling operation. For high-risk operators, the important part is not just the ban itself: the order shows how quickly state-level enforcement can turn prediction-market sports products into a geofencing and licensing problem.

1. Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Rosemarie Aquilina issued a temporary restraining order against Kalshi, and a Monday court filing says the company will be fined $120,000 for each day it fails to comply with the order’s geolocation requirements. The order lasts 14 days and expires on July 13.
2. Aquilina wrote that Michigan residents would suffer irreparable harm from being “exploited by Kalshi's sports betting operation masquerading as an investment opportunity.” The state’s attorney general had accused Kalshi of violating gambling laws.
3. Michigan is now the second US state to impose a court-ordered ban on Kalshi’s sports event contracts, after Nevada issued a temporary ban on Kalshi earlier in March. On June 17, Kentucky sued five prediction market platforms, including Kalshi and Polymarket, for allegedly operating unlicensed sports betting platforms. More than a dozen other states have also taken prediction market operators to court.
4. The other side of the fight is federal preemption. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has sued several states, arguing that federally regulated event contracts fall under its exclusive authority. Kalshi has been asked for comment on how it will respond to the ruling.
5. The timing matters because sports betting activity on prediction markets has been climbing since the start of the FIFA World Cup. Daily taker volume hit a record $713 million on June 20, according to Dune, and monthly sports betting volume rose 40% to $9.5 billion on Kalshi and 175% to $5.3 billion on Polymarket, according to Defirate data.

Bernstein said in a June 11 report that the 2026 FIFA World Cup could generate more than $3 billion in incremental sports betting handle and between $5 billion and $10 billion in additional consumer prediction market volume. Polymarket’s World Cup winner contract alone has generated over $3.5 billion in trading volume, and a Bitget Wallet study of 857,000 users found that about 60% of World Cup bettors interacted with the blockchain for the first time during their prediction market entry.