WASHINGTON – The number arrived midway through the group stage: $13.5 million in a single day of World Cup trading fees, a record for prediction market platform Kalshi. It was June 24. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s comment period on its landmark prediction markets rulemaking had been open for twelve days.
The CFTC published its notice of proposed rulemaking on event contracts in the Federal Register on June 12, opening a 45-day window for public input that closes on July 27. The FIFA World Cup final is scheduled for July 19. The commission’s 267-page proposal, developed over two years of deliberation and following a prior comment round that drew roughly 3,500 responses, would establish the first federal framework for determining which sports-event contracts prediction markets can legally list. The document the CFTC finishes this summer will determine what Kalshi is permitted to sell during the next World Cup, the next Super Bowl, and every major sporting event after that.
Under the proposed rules, prediction markets could offer contracts tied to game outcomes, win-loss records, tournament advancement, and season-long performance metrics. The commission would prohibit contracts on specific in-game plays, individual player injuries, officiating decisions, and events involving pre-collegiate athletes. A contract on whether France reaches the final would be permissible. A contract on whether a given player completes a specific play in the second half would not.
The American Gaming Association is not waiting for July 27 to state its position. In a letter sent to senators on June 16, a coalition comprising the AGA, the Indian Gaming Association, the National Congress of American Indians, the hotel workers’ union UNITE HERE, and the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 called on Congress to use the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the cryptocurrency market structure bill currently before the full Senate, to bar prediction markets from offering sports-event contracts entirely. The ask was explicit: amend the legislation before it passes to strip the CFTC’s jurisdiction over sports contracts, overriding the rulemaking process regardless of what the commission concludes.
The coalition’s argument is built on dollars, not doctrine. The AGA estimates that states have lost approximately $1 billion in tax revenue to prediction markets since the beginning of 2025, money that would otherwise have come from licensed sportsbooks paying state excise taxes, responsible gambling assessments, and licensing fees. “By offering nationwide sports betting through so-called sports event contracts and branding it as a federally regulated financial product,” the coalition wrote, “these platforms have bypassed state and tribal law, weakened consumer protections, and undercut a system built on local control.”
Bill Miller, the AGA’s chief executive, has framed the fight in terms the Senate is more likely to act on. The CFTC, he told a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection in May, had become “a rogue agency making a mockery of congressional intent.” The association disclosed separately that it spent $730,000 lobbying on prediction markets legislation in the first quarter of 2026 alone, its largest single-quarter expenditure on the issue since the platforms began their national expansion.
The scale of what the gaming industry is fighting over has grown substantially since those figures were first compiled. CNBC reported before the tournament began that the 2026 World Cup would likely become the largest gambling event in American history, citing a maturing U.S. sportsbook market, favorable kickoff times across North American time zones, and the draw of a World Cup staged on American soil. That forecast is tracking ahead of schedule. U.S. licensed sportsbooks were expected to handle between $2.82 billion and $4.3 billion across the full tournament. FanDuel and DraftKings each reported that the United States and Brazil group-stage matches set all-time records for both companies by handle and active users, with DraftKings recording handle roughly five times higher than at the same stage of the 2022 Qatar tournament.
The prediction market numbers running alongside those figures are more difficult to fit inside a licensing regime designed for sportsbooks. Kalshi recorded $13.5 million in fees on June 24 alone. Over the preceding week, the platform generated more than $75 million in fees from World Cup trading. Combined prediction market volume for the first two weeks of the tournament exceeded $17 billion, a figure that includes Polymarket’s World Cup markets alongside Kalshi’s.
That growth is unfolding inside a legal landscape that is unsettled and, in places, actively contested. A federal judge in Michigan ruled on June 17 that Kalshi’s sports contracts fall outside the CFTC’s preemptive reach under the Commodity Exchange Act, while the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reached the opposite conclusion in April. The Nevada Gaming Control Board has moved to hold Kalshi in contempt for geofencing failures that allowed Nevada residents to access contracts the company had agreed, under injunction, to block. The CFTC has responded to state-level enforcement by suing nine states directly – most recently Kentucky on June 23, the first Republican-led state drawn into the federal action.
Two deadlines are converging. The World Cup final is July 19. The CFTC comment period closes July 27. A Senate vote on the CLARITY Act could arrive at any point between them. None of those timelines is coordinated with the others, and none is waiting. What they share is a common subject: who gets to decide, once the final whistle sounds and the betting receipts are tallied, what Kalshi is permitted to do next.
