Six cease-and-desist letters, same day, same signature. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway told Kalshi, Polymarket, Robinhood, Crypto.com, Nova and Underdog on Friday to stop offering sports event contracts to Missouri residents or get licensed through the Missouri Gaming Commission. The argument is the one every other state has already made: calling it an “event contract” doesn’t change what it actually is, and what it actually is happens to be sports wagering under Missouri law.
I’ve written about this fight from the state side more than once, and the legal theory itself isn’t new. What’s different here is the scale of it — six platforms in a single afternoon instead of the usual one-state-one-company letter. Missouri didn’t just go after Kalshi, the company that’s absorbed most of this fight so far. It named Robinhood and Crypto.com too, both of which have leaned into prediction contracts as a side business rather than their whole identity, and Underdog and Nova, which are smaller and less equipped to fund the kind of multi-state legal war Kalshi’s been running. Six letters at once reads like a state trying to close every door in the building rather than the one door that’s gotten the most press.
Hanaway’s own comment is worth sitting with: “Companies cannot repackage sports bets as ‘event contracts’ to avoid Missouri law.” That’s not a new argument, but it lands differently coming right after Missouri residents voted to legalize mobile sports betting in December, with real license fees and a 10% tax on adjusted gross revenue attached. Missouri built a regulated market on purpose, with real money funding public education tied to it, and now six companies are taking bets on the same games without paying into any of that. From the state’s side, that’s not a gray area. That’s a licensed industry getting undercut by an unlicensed one selling the same product under a different name.
Hanaway told a local station she expects to get sued over this, and given how the rest of this fight has gone, she’s probably right — Kalshi alone has been party to more than a dozen of these suits already. But it’s worth remembering what that legal record actually looks like right now: states have won the overwhelming majority of the rulings so far, and every one of those rulings came from a judge looking at essentially this same argument. Missouri isn’t inventing a new legal theory here. It’s applying one that’s already worked repeatedly, just against a bigger group of defendants than usual.
None of this shuts anything down in Missouri today. These are cease-and-desist letters, not injunctions, and if the last year is any guide, at least some of these six will keep operating in the state while they fight it in court. But six companies getting the same letter on the same day is a different kind of signal than one company getting sued in one state. It reads like states have stopped treating this as a Kalshi problem and started treating it as an industry problem, which is a much worse position for every smaller platform on that list to be in.
