Kalshi, despite continued claims that it is not a gambling platform, appears to be behaving increasingly like a sportsbook. It has signed up as a member of the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) and has also been accused of limiting users who consistently profit on the platform.
The NCPG said it welcomes Kalshi as its first member in the financial services and trading category. The prediction market platform has pledged $2 million over the next two years to the group.
Other members of the NCPG include major sports betting companies, casinos, and lotteries. In a press release, the NCPG said it “maintains a neutral position on the legality of specific gambling, wagering, or prediction products.”
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said the company is “deeply committed to setting a new standard for responsible trading”. It has safeguards in place that are highly similar to responsible gambling policies at betting operators. These include trading breaks, self-limits, self-exclusion, and mental health resources available to customers.
In addition, DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish alleges that the company may be assisting market makers in limiting users who routinely profit from trades.
Does Kalshi Help Market Makers Limit Users?
Limiting winning bettors is a practice employed by almost all betting companies. Prediction market platforms, however, claim that this is a distinction between their products and gambling. While a gambling company needs users to lose money to make profits, a prediction market is indifferent to who wins, as it does not act as the house.
Kalish alleges that Kalshi helps market makers identify winning users, allowing the companies to decide when not to offer liquidity in markets. This would function much the same way as sportsbooks limiting a user’s ability to place bets.
It is not the act of limiting users that Kalish has a problem with, but the hypocrisy. He says there is a difference in sportsbooks limiting winners, which everyone knows, versus Kalshi doing so while “directly lying and gaslighting consumers and competitors about how you serve the market“.
Kalshi and the prediction market regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), frequently claim that prediction markets differ from betting and do not impose limits on profitable traders.
“Standard sportsbooks and casinos provide entertainment and possess considerable power to exclude winners. In derivative markets, that is not permissible,” said CFTC chair Michael Selig this week. “If you keep winning? Fantastic. You retain your profits. What we are witnessing is a distinction between markets and entertainment.”
However, in a post on X, Kalish claims there is evidence that Kalshi’s Request For Quote (RFQ) / market-maker infrastructure includes user identifiers and supports participant-level filtering.
Q: Why does Kalshi share your user id to Wall Street market makers in RFQ api?
— Matt Kalish (@mattkalish) May 18, 2026
A: To profile order flow for “risk management” *but* Wall Street = 😇, so we pinky promise to NOT to use it to flag winning users, share lists, and decide when we’d prefer to not provide liquidity 😉 pic.twitter.com/HRTUkngv4a
That post is one of many from Kalish openly criticizing Kalshi over the past few days. His central argument is that Kalshi is essentially a sportsbook, but an inferior product to platforms such as DraftKings, which he helped develop over 14 years at the company. He left in April and now heads a content-creation agency.
Others claim that RFQs only apply to parlays, while limit orders are anonymous. This would make it highly difficult for market makers to limit users in single markets.
Although parlays are becoming increasingly popular at Kalshi, they are rarely profitable for bettors. Around 70% of sportsbook revenue comes from bets involving multiple legs.
Limited Liquidity A Problem For Prediction Markets
Users looking to place individual wagers at Kalshi may run into limits when liquidity is insufficient, however. This is what set Kalish off on his tirade against the operator.
“Kalshi pissed me off when my PGA Championship bet got dumped to their market maker friends at a fraction of fair odds,” Kalish told Front Office Sports. That made him question “how sports bets are handled on Kalshi and who benefits from it.”
He wanted to cash out his wager on Brooks Koepka to win the tournament, but there was insufficient market liquidity to do so at a profitable price.
Liquidity in a market is the same for all users, whether they are consistently making a profit or a loss. It is quite different from a sportsbook limiting a winning bettor.
Kalshi Accused Of Acting As The House
At the same time, Kalish also alleges that most of the time, users are trading against market makers, which are essentially acting like sportsbooks. DraftKings and FanDuel have openly said they are acting as market makers on prediction market platforms.
“You’re not trading against me,” Kalish wrote in another post on X. “We’re all trading against Susquehanna and professional Wall Street market makers.”
Kalshi has been accused of deceiving users into believing they have a greater chance of profiting on the exchange due to its peer-to-peer format. A lawsuit in November claimed Kalshi “resembles a betting exchange where users place wagers indistinguishable from bets placed against a house.”
According to the lawsuit, consumers are often betting against Kalshi itself—through “market maker” subsidiaries Kalshi Trading LLC and KalshiEx, or hedge-fund partners, like Susquehanna.
Kalshi dismissed the claims as “meritless fiction”, arguing that it “demonstrates many fundamental misunderstandings about how federally regulated DCMs operate.”
Co-founder Luana Lopes Lara responded, “Kalshi is an exchange. It’s peer-to-peer and there is no house. Anyone can place orders and trade against anyone else, whether it’s a person or an entity. Like any financial exchange, we have market makers that compete openly against each other and help bootstrap liquidity.”
She added that, “Anyone can sign up to our market maker programs, where you commit to liquidity obligations: if you’re interested, email support and we’ll get you set up.”
The debate on whether Kalshi is a gambling platform looks set to continue, but it has, in some ways, recognized that it is highly similar for many users by signing up to the NCPG.
