Meta description: Kalshi signed five MLB club deals as baseball trading reached nearly 13 billion contracts, up 36-fold year over year.
Tags: Kalshi, MLB, CFTC, Polymarket, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers
Market platform: Kalshi
Category: Industry
Kalshi announced exclusive, multi-year brand partnerships on August 25, 2026 with five Major League Baseball clubs: the Atlanta Braves, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants. Fortune reported, citing a Kalshi spokesperson, that nearly 13 billion baseball-related contracts have traded on Kalshi in 2026, up from roughly 355 million during the comparable 2025 period.
The deals put Kalshi branding inside several of baseball’s largest local markets while the legal status of sports event contracts remains contested in state and federal courts. Kalshi operates as a Commodity Futures Trading Commission-regulated designated contract market, but state regulators have argued that sports contracts should be treated as gambling products subject to state law.
What did Kalshi announce with the five MLB teams?
Kalshi said in its August 25 announcement that the five agreements are exclusive, multi-year brand partnerships with the Braves, Red Sox, Dodgers, Padres and Giants. The company described the packages as including in-stadium signage, social, online and radio promotion, plus fan activations tied to the clubs.
The Dodgers package is the most detailed public arrangement. Kalshi said it includes LED signage around Dodger Stadium, naming rights to the Gold Glove Bar and on-site activations in Centerfield Plaza during the season. Fortune also reported that Kalshi declined to disclose financial terms for the five agreements.
Adam Barrick, Kalshi’s head of sports partnerships, framed the move around existing fan activity on the exchange. “It only makes sense to extend that fandom to some of the most beloved baseball teams in America,” Barrick said in Kalshi’s announcement. That is Kalshi’s commercial framing, and the company has a direct interest in presenting team deals as evidence of mainstream acceptance.
How much baseball trading has Kalshi reported?
Fortune reported on August 25 that nearly 13 billion baseball-related contracts have traded on Kalshi so far in 2026, citing a Kalshi spokesperson. The same report said that was up from roughly 355 million baseball-related contracts during the comparable period in 2025, a 36-fold increase.
The distinction matters. The reported figure is contracts, not dollars of trading volume. Kalshi’s own announcement described baseball trading volume as up 36 times year over year, but it did not provide a public methodology for how that figure was calculated or break out baseball trading by team, market type or contract category.
The baseball growth figure helps explain why team-level inventory has become more valuable to prediction-market operators. Kalshi is not just seeking generic sports visibility. It is buying official club marketing rights in markets where baseball contracts appear to have become a major part of its sports business.
Does Kalshi have a league-wide MLB deal?
Kalshi does not have a league-wide MLB partnership based on the public record around the August 25 announcement. MLB already has a league-level prediction-market partner: in a March 19, 2026 press release, Major League Baseball named Polymarket its Official Prediction Market Exchange and said Polymarket would receive access to MLB marks, logos, official league data from Sportradar and brand exposure across MLB’s digital ecosystem and league events.
That leaves Kalshi with five club-level deals, not a sport-wide agreement covering MLB as a league. Fortune reported, citing a person familiar with Kalshi’s plans, that the company is in discussions with Major League Baseball about a separate league partnership. No terms, timing or rights package has been announced by Kalshi or MLB.
The league-level context is important because MLB has separated commercial rights from integrity oversight. In the same March 19 announcement, MLB said it signed a memorandum of understanding with the CFTC tied to professional baseball and related prediction markets. The CFTC’s own March 19 release said the memorandum established a framework for the agency and MLB to discuss, cooperate and exchange information on issues including baseball integrity and related prediction markets.
Rival operators have also pursued baseball relationships. Fortune reported that Polymarket announced a New York Yankees partnership earlier in August 2026 and that Novig signed a multiyear agreement with the New York Mets in July. Those deals point to broader competition for team inventory, data relationships and legitimacy as sports event contracts move further into mainstream sports marketing.
Why does the CFTC matter to these partnerships?
Kalshi’s core legal position rests on federal commodities regulation. The company is a CFTC-regulated designated contract market, and it has argued in litigation that federally regulated event contracts are not state-regulated gambling products. State regulators have challenged that position in multiple jurisdictions, especially when the contracts involve sports outcomes.
The CFTC’s role in baseball also goes beyond Kalshi’s exchange status. The CFTC said its March 2026 memorandum with MLB gives both sides a mechanism to exchange information consistent with applicable law so they can respond to incidents and anticipate emerging trends. That arrangement reflects a practical integrity concern: if baseball outcomes are traded on federally regulated exchanges, the league and regulator need channels for monitoring suspicious activity.
For MLB clubs, the legal posture creates a split-screen business risk. Team sponsorship departments can sell signage and digital inventory to a federally regulated exchange, while state attorneys general and gaming regulators continue to argue in court that the same sports contracts should be restricted under state gambling laws.
Which legal fights are relevant now?
The sports-contract litigation is active enough that broad claims about nationwide availability can quickly become misleading. In an August 10, 2026 order in KalshiEX LLC v. Cafferelli et al., the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut noted that state courts in Massachusetts, Nevada and Michigan had ordered Kalshi to implement geofencing barring offerings to users in those states. The Connecticut court also noted that the Massachusetts order had been stayed pending appeal.
The same Connecticut order said civil enforcement actions brought by Nevada, Washington, Massachusetts and Michigan remained pending in state courts after remand, and that a criminal enforcement action was pending against Kalshi in Arizona state court. The court denied Kalshi’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the Connecticut case.
Washington moved after that Connecticut order. In State of Washington v. KalshiEX LLC, King County Superior Court Judge John McHale signed an amended preliminary injunction order on August 12, 2026 requiring Kalshi to stop offering, accepting or facilitating wagers on sports, elections, politics, entertainment, culture, technology, science and certain “mentions” markets in Washington, according to the Washington Attorney General’s Office. The order required IP-address and residency-based geofencing by August 19 and a multi-source geofencing system by September 2.
Those disputes do not erase the commercial significance of the MLB team deals, but they change how the deals should be read. Kalshi is expanding its sports marketing presence while courts decide whether state gambling laws can restrict sports-event contracts offered by a federally regulated exchange.
Why do the team deals matter for the prediction-market industry?
The five MLB agreements show how quickly prediction-market operators are moving from political and financial-event niches into the commercial machinery of major U.S. sports. Stadium signage, radio placements and team-branded activations are familiar sportsbook marketing tools, but Kalshi is using them under a federal exchange model rather than a state-by-state sportsbook license model.
That difference is the center of the industry fight. Licensed sportsbook operators must enter each state through gambling statutes, tax regimes and gaming commissions. Kalshi’s argument is that its contracts are federally regulated derivatives products. State regulators challenging the company argue that sports outcome contracts compete with sports betting and should face state gambling oversight.
MLB clubs have a direct financial incentive to monetize the category while it is growing, especially if prediction markets can reach states where traditional sports betting remains limited or unavailable. The public facts, however, do not show that the five partnerships resolve any legal question. They show that several teams are willing to sell official marketing rights while the regulatory fight continues.
What is the next milestone?
The next business milestone is whether Kalshi secures any league-level MLB arrangement beyond its five club deals, a harder task because MLB has already announced Polymarket as its Official Prediction Market Exchange. Fortune reported that talks are underway, but no agreement has been announced by Kalshi or MLB.
The next legal milestone is the September 2, 2026 Washington geofencing deadline in State of Washington v. KalshiEX LLC, alongside continued proceedings in the state enforcement cases identified by the Connecticut federal court, including Nevada, Massachusetts, Michigan and Arizona. Those cases will shape whether Kalshi can pair national sports marketing with broad user access to sports contracts, or whether state-by-state restrictions become a larger constraint on the model.
For now, the concrete development is narrower and significant: on August 25, 2026, Kalshi publicly attached its brand to five MLB clubs as baseball-related contracts on its platform reached nearly 13 billion for the year, according to Fortune’s report citing the company.
