Coinbase Closes Michigan Sports Event Contracts Oct 10

Every sports event contract held by a Michigan resident on Coinbase will be closed at 12:00 AM Eastern time on October 10, 2026, under a stipulation and order a federal judge signed on September 23. Read that clock carefully: 12:00 AM on October 10 is the instant after 11:59 PM on Friday, October 9, so the last evening you can act is Friday. There is no unwind window afterwards, because Coinbase stops offering new Michigan contracts at the same instant its own system closes the ones still open. If you hold a position from a Michigan account, the only way to control the price is to close it yourself before Friday night, because the order does not say what price Coinbase will use.

The document is a six-page Stipulation and Order Concerning Enforcement in Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc. v. Nessel, No. 4:25-cv-14092, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, entered at docket entry 65 by District Judge Shalina D. Kumar. We pulled it off the federal docket and read it in full, which is how we source everything on this desk. Nothing in it touches a Coinbase crypto balance.

What exactly did Coinbase agree to?

Two obligations, both landing at the same moment.

The first: Coinbase "agrees to cease offering new sports-related event contracts in Michigan that are traded on any DCM, including KalshiEX LLC, by 12:00 AM Eastern time on October 10, 2026." DCM is the Commodity Exchange Act's Designated Contract Market category, the federal registration this whole fight is about.

The second is the one with money attached. Coinbase "further agrees to close any open sports-related event contracts held by Michigan residents (i.e., contracts opened on or before October 9, 2026, which remain open and which the customer has not closed out voluntarily) by 12:00 AM Eastern time on October 10, 2026."

In exchange, Michigan's attorney general, the five Gaming Control Board members named as defendants and the board's executive director agreed to "forbear from pursuing any Enforcement Actions against Coinbase or its affiliates, employees, officers, directors, or agents" over sports event contracts, for as long as Coinbase keeps to the deal. That forbearance and the notice process attached to it are the side of the bargain worth reading closely, and we come back to them below.

How is this different from the Robinhood deadline?

The customer's transition window. Robinhood's customers got one, Coinbase's did not.

Robinhood signed a Michigan stipulation on September 4, nineteen days before this one, and it separated the two dates: no new Michigan contracts after September 9, then a full month before the company closed whatever was left at the end of October 9. Coinbase's order collapses that into a single timestamp. Note where the two land: Robinhood's closure deadline is end of day Eastern on October 9 and Coinbase's is 12:00 AM Eastern on October 10, which is the same moment. Both companies' Michigan books shut on Friday night. Robinhood's customers had a month of warning inside which to sell; on the face of this order, Coinbase's can still be buying an hour beforehand.

The Robinhood order says on its face why that gap exists, and the Coinbase order does not. Robinhood's recitals record that the Michigan Department of Attorney General "has requested that Robinhood stop trading by its Michigan customers in sports-related event contracts" and that Robinhood "expressed the need for some time to communicate to customers and give its Michigan customers sufficient time to effectuate an orderly transition." Coinbase's stipulation contains no equivalent recital, and nothing in its six pages records the company asking for one. We are comparing what the two documents say, not what either company argued privately.

The order sets those as outer limits rather than schedules. Coinbase is required to stop offering and to close open positions "by" that timestamp, so it is free to act earlier, and a Michigan customer should not read the table as a promise that trading stays open until Friday night.

What did Coinbase get for it?

Enforcement protection that starts immediately, and a cure process Robinhood's order does not contain.

This is worth separating from the customer question, because the two ran in opposite directions. Under paragraph 1 the defendants forbear "from the date of this Stipulation," which is September 23, while Coinbase goes on offering Michigan sports contracts for another seventeen days. And paragraph 1(a) gives Coinbase a process before any enforcement follows: written notice, ten days to respond or come into compliance, and a good-faith meet and confer. The Robinhood order has no comparable clause. So the company secured immediate immunity plus a notice-and-cure step; the part of the deal that would have cost the company something, an orderly wind-down for its customers, is the part that is missing.

Why now, when the appeal is still pending?

Because a state court moved while the federal case sat still.

The recitals set the sequence out. Coinbase lost its injunction motion on August 6, appealed on August 7, and the parties jointly froze the district case on August 21 pending that appeal. Then, on September 1, the Circuit Court for the 30th Judicial Circuit in Ingham County "entered a preliminary injunction in Nessel v. KalshiEX, LLC, 26-1087-CZ (Mich. 30th Cir.) enjoining KalshiEX LLC from, among other things, offering or listing sports-related event contracts in Michigan."

That matters for a reason beyond Coinbase. When we reported the Robinhood stipulation we said plainly that the Ingham County injunction rested on a single document we had not read, because Michigan state court records are not publicly fetchable the way federal ones are. It now appears in a second federal order, agreed to by the attorney general's own lawyers and signed by a different federal judge. We still have not read the state court's order, but the existence and substance of it are no longer single-sourced.

When does Michigan reopen for event contracts?

When an appeals court settles the question, or when the state injunction goes away.

The agreement runs until the first of those happens. The appeals it names are Coinbase's own, No. 26-1693; the Polymarket appeal, No. 26-1552; the Robinhood appeal, No. 26-1542; and the consolidated Kalshi appeals out of Ohio and Tennessee, Nos. 26-3196 and 26-5235. The order records that the Kalshi pair are "fully briefed, and oral argument was heard on July 30, 2026," so the Sixth Circuit has held the core preemption question since the summer. Four companies are waiting on that court, and Michigan has been cleared of three of them without it ruling: Kalshi by the Ingham County injunction, Robinhood and now Coinbase by agreement. We have seen no equivalent Michigan stipulation from Polymarket.

What does this mean for sweepstakes players in Michigan?

Nothing directly, because every brand we track already excludes the state.

The read-across is narrow but pointed. Michigan never passed a sweepstakes ban and never needed one: its regulator closed that market with cease-and-desist orders, which is what our Michigan legality page records and the pattern we found in 13 states that never legislated either. That exclusion leaves no sweepstakes balance in the state to worry about. One sweepstakes company took exactly the route this preemption argument was meant to protect: Novig retired both its coin currencies for a CFTC-designated exchange in August. Michigan is now the clearest picture of what that route costs when a state court gets there first. If you are reading this from somewhere else, where every other state stands is the first check, our guide to where sweepstakes casinos are legal explains how those categories differ, and the brands we have actually tested and ranked is the list to work from - with the payout minimums and cash-out speeds we have measured for the question a deadline like this one raises.

Sources & documents

• Stipulation and Order Concerning Enforcement, Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc. v. Nessel, No. 4:25-cv-14092 (E.D. Mich.), September 23, 2026
• Federal docket, Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc. v. Nessel (E.D. Mich.)
• Stipulation and Order Concerning Enforcement, Robinhood Derivatives, LLC v. Nessel, No. 1:26-cv-00730 (W.D. Mich.), September 4, 2026

We read the Coinbase stipulation in full on September 25, 2026, and every quotation above is verbatim from it. The Robinhood quotations in the comparison section are verbatim from that order, listed below, which we re-read the same day; the absence of an equivalent recital in the Coinbase order is a statement about those six pages and not about what either company asked for outside them. The dates in the table are the ones the order recites or the docket entries it cites. We have the agreement and not proof of performance: nothing we can read confirms what Coinbase will actually do in Michigan on October 9 or 10, and we are reporting the obligation, including its "by" deadlines, which permit earlier action. The Ingham County state court injunction is described here as two federal filings describe it; we have not seen the state court's own order. Coinbase's position on closing prices is not in the document and we have not asked the company.

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