Dan Primack on Kalshi: prediction markets headed to the Supreme Court, 70% of volume is sports betting

Summary

Kalshi: prediction markets, the Supreme Court, and the sports betting question

Kalshi reported $13 billion in trading volume in March 2026, and roughly 70% of that was sports betting — down from an even higher share in February, when the Super Bowl inflated the figure. The number makes concrete what the legal fight is really about: Kalshi has built a large, fast-growing platform that functions, in practice, as a sports book in states where sports books are banned.

Dan Primack, who interviewed Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour for an Axios show, argues the company is on solid legal footing. A New Jersey appeals court judge cleared Kalshi to proceed on the day the interview was recorded. Primack expects the case to reach the Supreme Court and believes Kalshi will win there too, largely because the CFTC — which regulates prediction markets as commodity contracts — has actively intervened in state-level attempts to ban the platform. Three states, including Arizona, have tried to block Kalshi; the CFTC has sued them in response. The Trump administration's CFTC commissioner, Mike Selig, is publicly supportive of prediction markets.

“I think ultimately prediction markets are gonna go to the Supreme Court. I think both Polymarket and Kalshi think that. I also think they're probably gonna win. About 70% of their volume last month was sports — you're still talking about $13,000,000,000 of volume last month. That's a big number. It's a loophole — they have figured out a way to basically get around sports betting laws.”

The sports betting tension

The legal argument is that prediction market contracts are commodities, not gambling products — and there is a century of precedent supporting that framing for commodity speculation broadly. Kalshi argues that sports volume also creates liquidity that makes the platform's more "serious" contracts — on elections, economic events, policy outcomes — function better.

Primack is skeptical of how clean that distinction is in practice. If someone in California or Texas, where DraftKings and FanDuel are blocked, opens Kalshi to bet on tonight's Celtics-Knicks game, the back-end legal structure does not change what they are doing. His read is that Kalshi would happily shed the sports volume if it could preserve the revenue and valuation without it — but it can't, so it won't.

One structural difference from traditional sports books: every Kalshi contract requires CFTC approval, and the agency has a 24-hour window to sign off. That rules out micro-betting on individual pitches or plays. Live trading on pre-approved contracts — like the Super Bowl — runs until the final second of the game, so the real-time element is still there, just constrained to events sanctioned in advance.

Where opposition comes from

Nevada has upheld an injunction banning Kalshi, which Primack attributes to casino lobbying. But the more durable opposition may come from states like Utah, which oppose gambling on moral grounds rather than competitive ones. Some of the legislation pushing back has come from Democrats, making this a bipartisan political risk rather than a purely partisan one.

The CFTC commissioner's own framing creates a small problem for Kalshi's sports position. Selig has argued publicly that prediction markets differ from casinos because casinos are entertainment. Sporting events are, definitionally, entertainment — which is an awkward line to hold when 70% of your volume is sports.

Congress is the one body that could definitively constrain Kalshi, Primack argues. The existing carve-outs from commodity trading rules — onion futures and box office returns — show that Congress can and does draw these lines. Box office contracts are currently banned, which is why Kalshi users can bet on a film's Rotten Tomatoes score but not its opening weekend gross.

Venture and IPO pipeline

On the broader venture market, Primack says Middle Eastern capital flows have not materially stopped despite the Iran conflict — deals are still closing, including a large private credit partnership announced with Saudi Arabia's PIF — but the pipeline outside a handful of names is thin. The industry is essentially waiting on three IPOs: SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Those three, if successful, would resolve years of distribution pressure for funds that have been unable to return capital. Outside that trio, Primack sees very little ready to price.

Data center ban proposals at the state level are registering as a more immediate concern for infrastructure investment than oil price spikes. The CEO of Constellation told Primack the ban proposals are what have energy deal-making participants "freaked out" — more so than Iran-driven energy price moves. The industry's PR response to those proposals has, in Primack's view, been poor.

Defense tech's boom could have stalled if the U.S. had followed through on more aggressive military action in Iran — not because every fund would have pulled back, but because the broader pool of venture capital that fills out rounds might have. The ceasefire likely preserved the current investment environment. Whatever happens next, munitions stockpiles depleted in the conflict will need replenishing, and that demand is not going away.