Kalshi Courts Tribal Partners While Others Fight Its Business in Court

In an exclusive exchange with Gambling Insider, Kalshi insists prediction markets and tribal gaming can thrive together. But questions about revenue sharing, legal risks and tribal sovereignty prove harder to answer.

Kalshi says prediction markets and tribal gaming can be friends. Whether the tribes currently fighting the company in court would agree is another matter.

In exclusive responses to Gambling Insider, the prediction market operator defended its growing partnerships with Native American tribes, arguing that the arrangements create genuine economic opportunities rather than simply providing another way to distribute its products. But while Kalshi was happy to explain the benefits of tribal ownership, it was less forthcoming about the financial terms, legal risks and potential advantages the partnerships might offer in its ongoing regulatory battles.

The timing is particularly interesting as Kalshi announced five tribal partnerships in recent weeks, even as other tribal nations challenge its sports event contracts under federal gaming law. The company insists there is room for everyone at the table, although the question of who gets to set the rules remains very much in dispute.

“The debate can no longer be reduced to prediction markets on one side and Tribes on the other.”

“Prediction markets and Tribal economic development don’t have to be at odds,” Kalshi told Gambling Insider. “Much of the debate assumes that every dollar in a prediction market is a dollar taken from a Tribal casino. The evidence says otherwise.”

It’s an appealing argument, particularly for tribes looking to diversify their economies. But record casino revenues and the legality of sports prediction markets are two different questions, and Kalshi’s answers reveal just how much remains unresolved.

Record Tribal Gaming Revenues Don’t Settle The Prediction Market Debate

Asked how it reconciles partnering with some tribes while others actively fight its business in court, Kalshi pointed to the industry’s financial performance. If prediction markets were really threatening tribal gaming, the company’s argument goes, why are casinos still making record amounts of money?

“More distribution is better and we want our markets in more places for people to trade on.”

The National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) reported $46.2 billion in tribal gaming gross revenue for fiscal year 2025, up 5.3% from the previous year. Seven of its eight reporting regions recorded growth, including the Sacramento region, where revenue rose 4.1%, and the Washington, D.C. region, which recorded a 9.8% increase.

“This represents the largest annual gain on record outside the pandemic recovery year, and growth accelerated in most National Indian Gaming Commission regions during the same period prediction markets expanded, including regions where Tribes had sued prediction market operators,” Kalshi said.

There is, however, a catch. The NIGC itself warns against drawing sweeping conclusions from regional revenue figures, noting that casino openings, expansions, closures, regulatory changes and differences in fiscal reporting periods can all influence the numbers.

In other words, tribal casinos making more money does not necessarily mean prediction markets aren’t affecting them. Nor does it answer whether Kalshi’s sports contracts infringe on gaming rights that tribes have spent decades establishing and defending.

The legal fight is also about who gets to regulate gaming on tribal lands, and whether a federally regulated derivatives exchange can offer products that look remarkably similar to sports bets without following the same rules.

Tribes Own The Apps, But Kalshi Doesn’t Reveal The Revenue Split

When Gambling Insider asked how the partnerships actually work, including who controls the platforms, how revenues are divided and who assumes the legal and financial risks, Kalshi was keen to stress that the tribes are not merely lending their names to the operation.

“Distribution partnerships are a core part of Kalshi’s business,” the company explained. “Exchanges have always gone to market through brokers and intermediaries who bring customers to them, and we add new broker and institutional partners all the time. This is no different.”

According to Kalshi, participating tribes own and operate their prediction market applications, controlling the branding, marketing and customer relationships. Kalshi supplies the infrastructure underneath, including trade matching, clearing, custody and surveillance.

“The Tribe owns the mobile app and control the customer-facing part of the business: the brand, the marketing, the application, and the relationship with users,” Kalshi said. “Kalshi provides the regulated exchange infrastructure underneath it (matching, clearing, custody, surveillance), the way a payments processor sits underneath a bank’s app without owning the bank.”

It’s a familiar arrangement in financial services, and Kalshi insists the tribal partners are running real businesses rather than collecting a fee for their association with the company.

“The Tribe isn’t paid a flat fee for use of its name; it owns and operates an ongoing business,” Kalshi said.

So far, so straightforward. But when it came to the actual revenue split, Kalshi stopped short of providing figures, describing the arrangements only as standard revenue-sharing agreements. It also did not explain who would be responsible for legal costs or financial liabilities if a tribal platform became caught up in regulatory enforcement.

That leaves a fairly significant detail missing from the picture. Tribes may own the shopfront, but Kalshi provides the marketplace, and the continued availability of some of its most commercially prominent contracts remains the subject of litigation.

Smaller Tribes Could Benefit, But The Financial Upside Remains Unclear

Kalshi also argues that prediction markets could provide economic opportunities for tribes that have not benefited equally from the casino industry’s success. And on that point, the figures reveal a genuine imbalance.

According to the NIGC’s 2025 report, approximately 8.6% of tribal gaming operations generated more than $250 million each, accounting for 55.8% of total industry revenue. Meanwhile, 54.3% of operations generated less than $25 million each and collectively accounted for just 4.8% of revenues.

“This model could be particularly meaningful for Tribes that haven’t benefited equally from the existing gaming economy,” Kalshi said.

For smaller tribes or those without access to lucrative casino markets, the prospect of operating a digital prediction market business could be attractive. Unlike a physical casino, an application does not require a large gaming floor, hotel complex or prime location near a major population center.

But whether these partnerships can deliver meaningful revenues is another question. Kalshi has not disclosed expected trading volumes, projected earnings for participating tribes or the percentage of revenue they will retain. Without those figures, the economic potential remains a proposition rather than a demonstrated outcome.

Gambling Insider also asked Kalshi about criticism that partnering with some tribes while others are fighting the company could deepen divisions within Indian Country. Rather than addressing that criticism directly, Kalshi returned to the unequal distribution of existing gaming revenues.

It’s a compelling commercial pitch, but it doesn’t quite answer the question of what happens when one tribe’s new business opportunity conflicts with another tribe’s efforts to protect its gaming rights.

Five Tribal Partnerships Expose Competing Visions Of Economic Sovereignty

Kalshi’s tribal expansion began in September with the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, which announced SaltTrade Derivatives, a tribally owned prediction market venture powered by Kalshi’s exchange infrastructure.

The company followed that announcement on October 7 with four additional partnerships involving Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town in Oklahoma, Greenville Rancheria in California, the Kletsel Dehe Wintun Nation’s economic development arm in California, and Alturas Indian Rancheria, also in California.

The ventures, including PokkeTrades, Sovereign Edge, Greenville and AIR Markets, are designed to give participating tribes their own consumer-facing applications through which customers can access Kalshi’s event contracts.

For Kalshi, the announcements offer a useful counterpoint to the suggestion that tribal nations are uniformly opposed to prediction markets. After all, it is harder to characterize an industry as universally hostile to tribal interests when some tribes are actively investing in it.

But five partnerships do not amount to a consensus across Indian Country, particularly when other tribal governments and gaming organizations are challenging the same business model in court. Tribal nations have different economic circumstances, regulatory arrangements and commercial priorities, and the interests of one tribe do not automatically reflect those of another.

That is where the argument becomes more complicated. One tribe may see a prediction market application as an opportunity to diversify its revenue, while another sees the underlying sports contracts as a challenge to its established gaming rights. Both can invoke tribal sovereignty, even if they reach opposite conclusions about Kalshi.

Federal Appeals Court Finds Kalshi’s Sports Contracts Likely Violate Tribal Gaming Law

On September 16, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Blue Lake Rancheria and Chicken Ranch Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians were likely to succeed in their claims that Kalshi’s sports event contracts violated the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) and the tribes’ gaming ordinances when offered on their lands.

The tribes argued that contracts paying out according to sporting results were effectively sports bets and could not lawfully be offered on their lands without tribal authorization. Kalshi maintained that its contracts were federally regulated derivatives falling under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA).

The appeals court found that the contracts constituted Class III gaming activities under IGRA and that transactions entered into by users on tribal lands fell within the statute’s scope. It also rejected the argument that the CEA’s exclusive jurisdiction provisions displaced IGRA, concluding that the two laws govern different aspects of the activity.

The ruling did not finally decide the lawsuit or itself grant the requested preliminary injunction. Instead, the court reversed part of the district court’s decision and sent the case back for consideration of the remaining requirements for preliminary relief.

Nevertheless, it was a significant development in a dispute that cuts to the heart of Kalshi’s business model. The company maintains that its products are financial contracts, but the Ninth Circuit found that federal commodities regulation did not prevent the tribes from pursuing their claims under gaming law.

Against that backdrop, Gambling Insider asked Kalshi whether its new tribal partnerships could help strengthen its position in the ongoing legal battles over sports prediction markets. The company did not directly address that possibility.

“The debate can no longer be reduced to prediction markets on one side and Tribes on the other,” Kalshi said. “What’s clear is that regulated national infrastructure and Tribal entrepreneurship can develop together. One does not have to lose for the other to win.”

That may be true as a commercial proposition, but it does not settle the legal question. Partnering with one tribe does not automatically confer permission to offer sports contracts on another tribe’s lands, particularly when that tribe is actively challenging their legality.

Kalshi Wants More Distribution But Didn’t Address The Legal Risks

Perhaps the most revealing answer came when Gambling Insider asked why a company that insists its contracts are financial products, not gambling, sees tribal gaming partnerships as important to its business model.

“More distribution is better and we want our markets in more places for people to trade on,” Kalshi said. There is little ambiguity about the commercial objective. Kalshi wants more customers accessing its markets, and tribal-owned applications provide another channel through which to reach them.

What remains less clear is whether the partnerships offer any strategic advantages beyond distribution, particularly as the company faces legal challenges from tribes arguing that its sports contracts violate gaming laws.

Gambling Insider also asked whether Kalshi was negotiating with additional tribes and whether the applications could operate in states where tribes currently hold exclusive gaming rights. The company did not answer those questions, leaving the geographical scope of its ambitions uncertain.

Nor did it explain how participating tribes would be protected if future court decisions restricted the sports contracts available through their applications. For businesses built around access to Kalshi’s exchange, that is hardly a minor consideration.

The distinction between owning an application and controlling the products available through it could become increasingly important if the courts continue to scrutinize sports event contracts under tribal gaming law.

Kalshi’s Tribal Allies Can’t Resolve Its Disputes With Other Tribes

Ultimately, Kalshi’s expansion highlights a tension within the broader debate over tribal gaming and prediction markets. For participating tribes, the partnerships represent an opportunity to pursue new commercial ventures and exercise greater control over their economic futures.

For tribes opposing Kalshi, the same principle of sovereignty underpins their efforts to enforce gaming laws and protect the rights established through federal legislation and tribal-state agreements.

Neither position can simply be dismissed as opposition to tribal economic development. The disagreement concerns how those economic opportunities should operate within an existing legal framework, and whether the growth of one industry could weaken protections relied upon by another.

Kalshi’s message is that prediction markets and tribal gaming do not have to be enemies. Its growing list of tribal partners certainly demonstrates that some governments are willing to test that proposition.

But the company’s responses leave several important questions unanswered, from how revenues and legal risks are divided to whether the partnerships could influence its broader regulatory strategy.

For now, Kalshi has found tribes willing to do business with it and tribes willing to fight it in court. The company insists there is room for both. Whether the law agrees is still being worked out.

Gambling Insider sought comment from Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town, representatives of the Kletsel Dehe Wintun Nation, the Indian Gaming Association, the Washington Indian Gaming Association, and tribal gaming experts Victor Rocha, Steven Light and Kathryn Rand. No responses had been received at the time of writing.

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