Nevada seeks contempt order against Kalshi as California joins 37-state brief

Nevada is asking its state court to hold Kalshi in contempt for not fully complying with an order to block users in Nevada from trading sports, entertainment, and election contracts. At the same time, California is piling into the legal fight with a new amicus brief, which tells you the pressure on prediction markets is no longer coming from one jurisdiction at a time.

1. On Friday, the Nevada Gaming Control Board asked the state’s First Judicial District Court to hold Kalshi in contempt for failing to follow the court’s order restricting Nevada-located users from trading sports, entertainment, and election contracts on the platform.
2. Nevada says its court remains the only court to issue an order blocking Kalshi from trading in a US jurisdiction. The preliminary order was issued on 3 April and was later affirmed through an amended order on 18 May, but the state says Kalshi still has not complied.
3. The state is seeking penalties of “at least $120,000 each day” that Kalshi remains non-compliant, according to court filings. Nevada also says Kalshi’s current setup is only a “homegrown ‘solution’” based on IP addresses and costs $190,000, while IP addresses are “notoriously unreliable for determining users’ locations”.
4. Kalshi initially responded by blocking users whose IP addresses are located in Nevada, but Nevada argues that is not the same thing as geofencing, which would restrict the entire jurisdiction rather than individual users. That matters because geofencing is standard practice in the US gambling industry, while prediction markets have resisted it on cost and federal regulatory grounds.
5. On the same day, California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said California joined a coalition of 37 attorneys general in filing an amicus brief against Kalshi in its case against Ohio before the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. California said this was the seventh time it has joined multistate efforts against prediction markets like Kalshi, and the office also joined a nearly identical brief in Kalshi’s case versus Tennessee two weeks ago.

For PSPs, the practical point is simple: when a jurisdiction pushes for geofencing instead of IP-based blocking, the compliance burden stops being theoretical. It becomes a question of whether a platform can actually ring-fence users by state, and what it costs when the answer is no.