Ninth Circuit blocks Kalshi sports contracts on two tribal lands
The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit blocked Kalshi on Wednesday from offering sports event contracts on the lands of two California tribes, the Blue Lake Rancheria and Chicken Ranch. The court ruled that tribes are likely to prove Kalshi violated federal gaming law. Robinhood intervened in the case and claimed it would lose substantial business if the tribes prevailed. The ruling protects tribal exclusive rights to sports betting on sovereign territory and narrows where Kalshi can operate its event-contract products.
The tribal ruling shrinks Kalshi's addressable market before its state-by-state legal fight even resolves. Two California tribes now hold enforceable barriers against CFTC-registered event contracts on sovereign land, and other tribal nations can file copycat suits using the same federal gaming law theory. Robinhood's intervention signals that broker-dealer partners see real revenue at risk from these territorial carve-outs.
Each new tribal or state exclusion fragments liquidity into smaller pools, raising trading costs and reducing contract appeal. Kalshi must now allocate legal spend across parallel tribal, state, and federal appeals while geofencing its national platform market by market. The compounding territorial losses threaten the economics of a nationwide sports contract business before any Supreme Court resolution.
The Ninth Circuit now has ruled against Kalshi twice in four days on tribal and state gambling enforcement, after its Nevada loss last week stripped the federal preemption shield that CFTC-registered platforms had relied upon to offer sports-linked contracts nationwide.