Gary Gensler, the former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit stating that the Dodd-Frank Act did not give the CFTC authority to regulate sports betting. The filing relates to litigation between prediction market platform Kalshi and the state of Ohio, where the central dispute is whether sports-related event contracts fall under federal oversight or remain within state gambling regulation.
Gensler challenges the federal oversight argument
Gensler’s position directly counters the claims advanced by current CFTC chair Michael Selig and Kalshi. Selig and Kalshi argue that sports-related event contracts belong within the scope of federal regulation rather than state gambling authority. Gensler argued that if the Dodd-Frank Act had truly stripped states of their power to regulate sports betting, that would have been major news at the time, yet no one understood the law that way when it was enacted and implemented.
Gensler served as CFTC chair from 2009 to 2014 and was responsible for implementing rules tied to the Dodd-Frank Act. His brief therefore addresses both the interpretation of the statute and the regulatory history surrounding its rollout. In his view, the law cannot be read as transferring authority over sports betting from state regulators to the CFTC.
Kalshi’s Ohio case remains at the center of the dispute
The amicus brief is connected to Kalshi’s lawsuit against Ohio. The state’s gambling regulator had ordered Kalshi to stop offering sports-related event contracts to residents in Ohio. Kalshi then sued the state, but its request for a preliminary injunction has already been denied by the court. The CFTC has sided with Kalshi in the case and argued that Ohio exceeded its authority.
Over the past year, the CFTC has continued trying to expand its regulatory claim over prediction markets and has sued multiple states in an effort to establish its jurisdiction. This week, the agency also proposed broader prediction market rules. Those rules still generally support sports-related contracts, while seeking stricter limits on betting tied to events such as terrorist attacks, assassinations and wars. The boundary between federal commodities oversight and state gambling regulation remains the key issue in the Kalshi-related litigation.