Novig Massachusetts Lawsuit Stayed Until Kalshi Appeal

Novig's federal lawsuit against Massachusetts is frozen indefinitely: on August 24 a federal judge stayed it until the state's Supreme Judicial Court decides a separate appeal by Kalshi, and dismissed six of the seven officials Novig had sued.

The order landed on the public docket on August 25 and we read it the same day. It matters to sweepstakes players for one reason above the rest: Novig is the operator that came out of this industry, ran a Sweeps Coins sportsbook, and then retired Novig Cash and Novig Coins for a federally regulated exchange. Its attempt to put that pivot beyond a state's reach has just stopped moving.

What did the judge order in Novig's Massachusetts case?

Three things, in Ludlow Exchange, LLC v. Campbell, No. 1:26-cv-13615, in the District of Massachusetts. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV granted a joint motion the parties filed at entry 26 on August 20, docketed as a "Joint MOTION to Stay Proceedings and Stipulation of Voluntary Dismissal."

1. The case is stayed "until KalshiEX LLC has exhausted its state appellate rights" over a preliminary injunction the Suffolk Superior Court issued against it in the Massachusetts Attorney General's enforcement action.
2. The defendants' time to answer the complaint runs to "60 days after the stay entered by this order is terminated."
3. All claims against Jordan Maynard, Dean Serpa, Eileen O'Brien, Bradford R. Hill, Nakisha Skinner and Paul Brodeur "are hereby DISMISSED without prejudice."

Point three is the one with teeth. Those six are, in order, the chair of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, its executive director and four commissioners. Novig named all seven officials when it brought this case; the docket records the filing as August 6 and the complaint itself is signed and stamped August 7. Novig now has one defendant left, Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, and she is the one who can actually bring an enforcement action under the statute Novig is worried about.

How did Novig's Massachusetts case get here?

Filed, stalled and half-dismissed inside three weeks.

Why does a Massachusetts case wait on a Kalshi appeal?

Because Novig's complaint said so itself. It names Commonwealth v. KalshiEX LLC, No. 2584CV02525 in Massachusetts Superior Court, and describes the state as having "moved aggressively against federally regulated event-contract trading within its borders, suing KalshiEX LLC for offering the type of contracts at issue here."

That case is now at the Supreme Judicial Court as No. SJC-13906, which is the number Judge Saylor's order itself uses. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's amicus brief in it, filed on April 24, 2026 in support of Kalshi and of reversal, supplies the rest of the posture: a review from a judgment of the Suffolk Superior Court, Appeals Court number 2026-P-244.

The August 24 order says the stay ends when the SJC "issues an opinion affirming or reversing the entry of the preliminary injunction," which tells you no opinion had issued as of that date. It sets no outside date, and we cannot give you one: the Massachusetts appellate courts' public docket refuses our requests, so that order is the most recent record on the SJC case we can actually read.

What does this mean if you play in Massachusetts?

Nothing changes today, and that is the point. Massachusetts has not banned sweepstakes casinos, as our Massachusetts state page sets out; the bill that would have changed that died in a study order when formal sessions ended on July 31, and this order does not touch the question either way. It also does not protect Novig: the stay pauses Novig's own request for an injunction, so the Attorney General's enforcement powers are exactly where they were.

Novig is still trading there. Its help centre, last edited on August 4, says the platform is "available nationwide, with the exception of Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan," and requires you to be 21 or older with completed identity checks. So a Massachusetts resident can open a Novig account while the company's lawsuit arguing the state cannot touch it sits on ice. Novig's complaint puts the exposure it fears at civil penalties "of up to $2,000 for each violation or $5,000 for violations arising from the same series of events," plus imprisonment and escalating criminal fines under G.L. c. 23N, § 21.

Are the other event-contract cases being stayed too?

Massachusetts is one of five suits Novig has running against state attorneys general, and it is not the only one that has stopped. On August 20 the same move was made on four federal preemption dockets at once: a joint stay motion, in every case after the operator had lost a preliminary injunction and appealed. Two of the four resulting orders are readable, and Novig's is the later of those. On the other two, all we can honestly say is that a judge acted.

We covered the Connecticut and Michigan half of that in our piece on the Second Circuit denying Kalshi a pause in Connecticut. Novig's New York case is the outlier still running: oral argument on its preliminary injunction is set for September 11, in a state that has closed the sweepstakes model by law.

Does Novig still run a sweepstakes product?

No. Both currencies are gone. Novig retired Novig Cash and Novig Coins when it launched the exchange nationwide on August 4, and its help centre said so when we read it on August 8. Its complaint does not. Docketed August 6 and signed August 7, it describes the coin product in the present tense, says Novig "has continued to operate this offering under state oversight," and adds that the Sweepstakes Rules "do not currently permit full sweepstakes redemption for participants located in Massachusetts" - an operator restriction, not a state one.

That mismatch is not new and we are not going to present it as new: we flagged it when we covered the three complaints Novig filed that week. What is new is that nothing filed since has explained it, and the August 24 order does not touch the point. If you held Novig Cash, there is nothing left to redeem either way; balances were converted to US dollars when the currency was retired.

For anyone reading this because their sportsbook turned into something else: the mechanics that make a sweeps product a sweeps product are in our guide to Gold Coins and Sweeps Coins, and the operators still running that model are on our ranked list of sweepstakes casinos. Legendz and Sportzino are the two sweeps sportsbooks we rank, neither of them a party to any of these cases, and Legendz is the closest thing left to what Novig used to be.

Sources & documents

• Federal docket, Ludlow Exchange, LLC v. Campbell, No. 1:26-cv-13615 (D. Mass.) - entry 30, the August 24 electronic order, quoted verbatim above
• Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, filed August 7, 2026 - 44 pages, read in full
• Amicus brief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Commonwealth v. KalshiEX LLC, SJC-13906, April 24, 2026 - the source for the Supreme Judicial Court and Appeals Court numbers
• Novig help centre: Eligibility and Legality - dateModified 2026-08-04T05:49:00Z
• Federal docket, Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc. v. Tong (D. Conn.) - entry 100, the August 21 stay order, read in full
• Federal docket, Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc. v. Nessel (E.D. Mich.) - entry 62, August 21, label only
• Federal docket, KalshiEX LLC v. Cafferelli (D. Conn.) - the August 21 order on the stay motion is unnumbered and textless
• Federal docket, Ludlow Exchange, LLC v. James (S.D.N.Y.) - entry 38, the August 11 order setting oral argument for September 11

All five dockets were read on August 25, 2026. Two of the four stay orders are readable and two are not: the Michigan order at entry 62, and the order the same day on Kalshi's own Connecticut stay motion, carry no retrievable text, so for those two we report that the court acted and not how it ruled. The Coinbase Connecticut order and the Massachusetts order are quoted from their own text. We could not read the Supreme Judicial Court's docket in Commonwealth v. KalshiEX LLC at all; that court's public case search refuses our requests, and everything above about the state appeal comes from the August 24 federal order and the CFTC's April 24 amicus brief. The public mirror holds only what somebody has pulled from PACER, so nothing here should be read as the complete file. We asked neither party for comment and quote none.

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