Kalshi Becomes Exclusive Prediction Market Partner of the US Open Amid Ongoing Legal Fights
Flushing Meadows is loud in a way that has nothing to do with tennis this year. Between match points and the usual roar off Arthur Ashe Stadium, a quieter negotiation was wrapping up just in time for the tournament’s main draw — one that had nothing to do with who wins the trophy and everything to do with who gets to take bets on it.
Kalshi has become the exclusive prediction-market partner of the US Open, sealing the arrangement with the US Tennis Association only after last week’s qualifying rounds had already concluded. It was not a deal years in the making. Reporting around the tournament indicates the USTA had not originally planned to have any prediction-market partnership in place for 2026 at all, with that kind of arrangement expected to wait until 2027 or later. New USTA chief executive Craig Tiley, who took the role on July 20 after 21 years running Tennis Australia, is credited with pushing the deal through in time for this year’s event instead.
The exclusivity is the part drawing the most attention. Under the arrangement, rival prediction-market platforms are barred from advertising both inside the tournament grounds and across its broadcast partners, which includes ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Deportes, ABC, and their streaming platforms. That is a meaningful lockout in a sport whose US broadcast rights sit almost entirely with one media company. As of Sunday afternoon, Kalshi had not yet appeared on the US Open’s official list of partners, suggesting the announcement machinery was still catching up to the deal itself.
On the platform, tennis is already drawing real volume. Kalshi’s own tournament markets show Aryna Sabalenka as the clear favorite in the women’s draw at roughly 23% to 24%, ahead of Coco Gauff in the mid-teens and Iga Swiatek close behind — with an estimated $1.5 million already wagered on the women’s singles winner alone within the first weekend.
None of this is happening in a legal vacuum. Kalshi has spent much of the past year fighting a running battle with state regulators over whether its CFTC-regulated event contracts on sports outcomes are actually just sports betting wearing a different label, and therefore subject to state gambling law rather than federal commodities oversight. That fight hasn’t gone Kalshi’s way everywhere — a federal judge sided with Utah earlier this year in one such case — even as the company continues to argue, and in some venues successfully, that its federal registration should preempt state-level bans. Landing an exclusive marquee sports partnership in the middle of that unresolved legal fight is either a sign of confidence or a calculated bet that facts on the ground will outrun the courts.
Either way, the US Open now joins a growing list of major US sporting events where a prediction market, rather than a traditional sportsbook, holds the exclusive on-site and broadcast relationship — a shift that would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago.
Prediction-market contracts carry real financial risk and remain subject to shifting, sometimes conflicting, regulation from state to state. Nothing here is a recommendation to trade on any platform. Readers wanting to understand how prediction markets fit into the broader crypto and derivatives landscape can find grounding in coin680’s Bitcoin Academy.