Kalshi's Nevada Case Stayed for Supreme Court Petitions

Kalshi's federal case in Nevada is frozen: a federal magistrate judge stayed all discovery and further proceedings on September 24, 2026, until the earlier of five months from that date or the day the Supreme Court disposes of three pending certiorari petitions. Every party asked for it jointly, including the Nevada Attorney General, and fact discovery had been due to close on October 30. Nothing in the order decides the preemption question, and no sweepstakes operator is a party to any of it. But one of the three petitioners is expressly asking the Supreme Court to take its time, which makes February 24, 2027 the date to watch rather than any of the autumn deadlines.

The case is KalshiEX, LLC v. Dreitzer, No. 2:25-cv-00575-APG-BNW in the District of Nevada, with the Nevada Resort Association as intervenor-defendant. The order is document 311, six pages, entered by Magistrate Judge Brenda Weksler on the stipulation the parties submitted the day before. We pulled it off the federal docket and read it in full, which is how we check everything we publish.

What did the Nevada court order on September 24?

A freeze, on terms the parties wrote themselves.

Paragraph 7 is the operative one. The parties agreed "to stay all discovery in this action and further proceedings until the earlier of: (i) five (5) months from the date of the order granting this Stipulation by the Court, or (ii) the date on which the Supreme Court decides the last of the Pending Certiorari Petitions, whether by grant or denial of certiorari." The order was signed on September 24, 2026, so the five-month leg of that runs to February 24, 2027.

Note what "whether by grant or denial" does. The stay does not wait for the Supreme Court to answer the question. It waits only for the Court to decide whether to take it. A denial across all three ends the stay just as a grant does.

Two details tell you how far along the case already was. "Party document discovery in this action is substantially complete," the stipulation says, though it also concedes "a limited amount of outstanding document production to be completed" and "certain outstanding document discovery disputes that may require resolution upon the expiration of the stay, including motions to compel concerning documents marked privileged." Those disputes are held in abeyance rather than resolved. Within 14 days of the stay expiring, the parties must either file a joint status report agreeing to extend it or propose a new discovery schedule.

There is also a clause worth noticing for what it implies about the size of this fight. If discovery resumes and a witness has to sit for a deposition in this case and in "one or more other federal actions in this Court involving similar challenges to state regulation of prediction markets," the parties will confer about coordinating so the same person is not deposed twice. Those other Nevada actions are not hypothetical: Robinhood Derivatives sued in the same district court, and so did Crypto.com's derivatives exchange, in North American Derivatives Exchange, Inc. v. State of Nevada, No. 2:25-cv-978. Both of those cases are now two of the three petitions the stay is waiting on.

The stipulation carries its own limit: it "shall not be cited or used as precedent in any other discovery dispute in this or any other action."

Which Supreme Court petitions is the stay waiting on?

Three, and they are worth getting the numbers right, because the stipulation does not.

The document names them as Flaherty v. KalshiEX, LLC, No. 25-1922; N. Am. Derivatives Exch., Inc. v. Nevada, No. 25-7187; and Robinhood Derivatives, LLC v. Dreitzer, No. 25-7831, and describes all three as "now docketed in the Supreme Court of the United States." Those are the courts-of-appeals numbers, not Supreme Court ones - 25-1922 is the Third Circuit case, and 25-7187 and 25-7831 are Ninth Circuit appeals. We checked each of them against the Supreme Court's own docket files: 25-1922 and 25-7831 return a 404, and 25-7187 returns a real but entirely unrelated case, an in forma pauperis petition against the United States out of the Federal Circuit that has nothing to do with prediction markets. Here are the three actual dockets, pulled from the Court's machine-readable feed:

The Robinhood petition asks "whether the Commodity Exchange Act preempts the application of state gaming laws to sports-related event contracts traded on federally regulated contract markets." Lisa S. Blatt of Williams & Connolly is counsel of record. The Crypto.com petition, filed by Shay Dvoretzky of Skadden, puts the circuit split in its question presented directly: the Third Circuit holds these contracts are "swaps" no different from weather swaps, in KalshiEX, LLC v. Flaherty, 172 F.4th 220, "[b]ut the Ninth Circuit disagrees." Nevada's Solicitor General, Heidi P. Stern, is counsel of record for the state on both.

The third is the one we have already covered: New Jersey's petition asking the Supreme Court to take the preemption question, where the state is the petitioner rather than the defendant, and where a September 22 order pushed the response from October 8 to November 9. The sweepstakes model is banned outright in New Jersey.

When will the Supreme Court decide these petitions?

Not quickly, on the only evidence available. Nobody is asking it to hurry, and one of the three petitioners is asking it to wait, which is the part of this the stay's five-month leg turns on.

Robinhood's own petition heads its second argument "The Question Presented Is Important and Squarely Presented, but Resolution Should Wait." It tells the Court that the CFTC has a rule in the works that "will provide significant clarity to the market and state regulators regarding the CFTC's understanding of 'swaps'," that there is "reason to think that one member of the Ninth Circuit panel that decided this case might have decided the case differently had the proposed rule been in effect," and, flatly, that "The Court could benefit from waiting for the CFTC to promulgate its rule before granting certiorari to decide this case." Robinhood asks for a grant now only in the alternative, if the Court is already inclined to take New Jersey's petition or another one.

That matters because the Nevada stay lifts on whichever comes first: five months, or the Court disposing of the last of the three. A petitioner arguing for delay makes the last of the three later, not sooner. February 24, 2027 is the more realistic end date.

The same petition gives the clearest available count of how big this fight has become: "more than twenty States (and one city)" have threatened or commenced enforcement over sports-related event contracts, proceedings are pending "in at least twelve States," exchanges and brokers have filed "more than thirty federal-court actions," the CFTC has brought nine of its own, and appeals are live "in six circuits and one state supreme court."

Has the Ninth Circuit finished with the Nevada case?

No, and that is the other reason nothing is moving.

The ruling underneath all of this is the Ninth Circuit's August 28 decision that Nevada can enforce its gaming laws against Kalshi, KalshiEX, LLC v. Assad, No. 25-7516. It is the decision that created the circuit split the two Nevada petitions are built on, which is why a discovery timetable in Las Vegas is now hostage to a docket in Washington. Kalshi petitioned for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc on September 9. Read on September 26, that petition is still undecided, so the mandate has not issued. The appellate docket has instead filled up with people wanting to be heard on it: amicus briefs and motions for leave from Colin Skow on September 17, Paradigm Operations LP on September 18, and The Coalition for Prediction Markets on September 21, each filed across all three consolidated appeal numbers. KalshiEX filed a status report on September 25.

A missing mandate stopped a second district court the same day, for a different reason. In San Francisco on September 24, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley heard the tribes' motion for leave to amend in the tribal IGRA case they won in part on September 16 and declined to lift the stay there, recording that "The Ninth Circuit has not issued their mandate regarding this action." The Nevada stay is not keyed to any mandate - it runs on the certiorari petitions - so the two freezes are separate mechanisms. What they share is that on one day, two federal district courts inside the Ninth Circuit both decided there was nothing useful to do until a higher court moved.

One caution on dates. The Supreme Court rebuilds those docket files on its own schedule, and all three carried a creation stamp of September 24, 2026 when we read them. Anything filed in the two days since may not be in them yet, so treat the deadlines above as the position as of that stamp.

Does this change anything for a sweepstakes player?

Not today, and not to any balance you hold. Prediction markets are a different product under a different statute, and none of the 33 brands we review is a party to these cases. The federal regulator on that side of the line, the CFTC, has separately warned those exchanges that sweepstakes-style reward programs likely break their access rules.

What it changes is the calendar. The argument at the centre of all three petitions - that a federal regulator's jurisdiction displaces state gambling law - is the same shape as the argument the Gold Coins and Sweeps Coins model rests on when the industry says a sweepstakes casino is a promotion rather than gambling. Whether sweepstakes casinos are legal turns on state law today because no federal appeals court has taken that question away from the states, and two of them have now declined to: the Ninth Circuit in August and the Sixth Circuit in September. Until the Supreme Court says otherwise, the state-by-state legality matrix is the thing that governs where you can play, and our ranked list of sweepstakes casinos is built on it.

Sweepstakes casinos are banned in Nevada too, so a Nevada reader is not choosing between brands here in any case. And the wider preemption fight keeps going while this one case sleeps: the Sixth Circuit ruled against Kalshi in Ohio and Tennessee on September 25, one day after Nevada pressed pause.

If you want to follow this without reading dockets, three dates carry it:

1. October 14, 2026 - Nevada's response to the Robinhood petition, No. 26-338, is due.
2. October 15, 2026 - Nevada's response to the Crypto.com petition, No. 26-344, is due.
3. November 9, 2026 - Kalshi's response to New Jersey's petition, No. 26-299, is due.

Only after all three are in can the Court schedule them for conference, and only then does a grant or a denial become possible. Nothing before those dates will change where you can legally play.

Sources & documents

• Stipulation and Order Regarding Stay of Discovery, KalshiEX, LLC v. Dreitzer, No. 2:25-cv-00575-APG-BNW (D. Nev.), Doc. 311, filed September 24, 2026 - six pages, granted by Magistrate Judge Brenda Weksler. Every quotation from the stay and every case number attributed to the stipulation is from this document
• Supreme Court docket, Flaherty v. KalshiEX, LLC, No. 26-299 - lower court listed as Third Circuit No. 25-1922; the November 9 response extension granted September 22
• Supreme Court docket, Robinhood Derivatives, LLC v. Dreitzer, No. 26-338 and the petition itself - 45 pages; lower court listed as Ninth Circuit No. 25-7831; the source of the question presented, the "Resolution Should Wait" argument at pages 20 to 24, and the litigation counts
• Supreme Court docket, N. Am. Derivatives Exchange, Inc. v. Nevada, No. 26-344 and the petition itself - 48 pages; lower court listed as Ninth Circuit No. 25-7187; the source of the circuit-split framing and of D. Nev. No. 2:25-cv-978
• Supreme Court docket file for No. 25-7187 - the unrelated Federal Circuit case that the stipulation's number actually returns. The equivalent files for 25-1922 and 25-7831 return 404
• Nevada district-court entry list and the District of Nevada public filing feed - where we found the order. Entry 311 is dated September 24, 2026 and reads "ORDER Granting 310 Stipulation to Stay Discovery. Signed by Magistrate Judge Brenda Weksler on 9/24/2026"
• Ninth Circuit entry list for Nos. 25-7516, 25-7187 and 25-7831 - the September 9 rehearing petition still undecided, the three amicus filings of September 17, 18 and 21, and KalshiEX's September 25 status report, read September 26, 2026
• Blue Lake Rancheria v. Kalshi Inc. entry list (N.D. Cal.) - entry 98, the September 24, 2026 minute entry before Judge Corley containing the mandate quotation
• KalshiEX, LLC v. Assad, No. 25-7516 (9th Cir. Aug. 28, 2026) - the published opinion the stipulation cites, giving its number as 25-0516. Also the source for Heidi P. Stern's title as Nevada Solicitor General

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