Kalshi founders summoned to Utah court as Sporttrade wins DCM status
Utah's criminal case against Kalshi's Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara advances to arraignment as Sporttrade and STX secure federal exchange approvals from the CFTC.
Kalshi's co-founders, chief executive Tarek Mansour and chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara, have been summoned to appear in a Utah state court next month to answer criminal charges, according to SBC Americas.
Utah Attorney General Derek Brown filed 13 felony counts and one misdemeanour against the prediction markets company in late October, naming Mansour and Lopes Lara as co-defendants. The pair are due at Salt Lake City's Third District Court on 4 December for an initial arraignment.
The criminal filing sits within a wider legal tangle between Kalshi and Utah. The state had already brought a separate civil enforcement action in October against Kalshi and two Susquehanna trading firms, after a federal court declined to grant Kalshi a preliminary injunction against state officials.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission then petitioned for an injunction against Utah on 26 October. Two days later, Utah pressed ahead with the criminal charges, pointing to an investigation that found residents able to open accounts and trade on sports prediction markets despite the state constitution's explicit ban on real-money gambling.
Elsewhere in the sector, Sporttrade finished its pivot away from its original peer-to-peer betting exchange model after the CFTC granted it registration as a federally regulated sports prediction markets exchange. The firm had already secured derivatives clearing organisation status in mid-October and is now also registered as a designated contract market.
The combined registrations let Sporttrade list, process and clear event contracts on its own platform, clear trades from other designated contract markets, and work with futures commission merchants, introducing brokers and other infrastructure providers. The company said it is already onboarding brokers with national distribution, including Fliff, as part of a pipeline of partners it is targeting for rapid market expansion.
Sporttrade operated as a licensed betting exchange across five states before announcing in May that it would wind down those state-level operations to pursue federal registration instead. Founder and chief executive Alex Kane described the new CFTC status as a full-circle moment, saying the company was founded on the idea that sports markets deserve the same structure, pricing and regulatory integrity as traditional financial markets.
Kane added that operating as both exchange and clearing venue would let Sporttrade offer broker partners stronger market quality while giving traders the liquidity and transparency they expect, and said the firm had begun clearing discussions with other exchanges that have followed its technology over the past five years.
A separate sports-trading platform, STX, also secured federal registration this week. Its subsidiaries, XV Exchange LLC and XV Clearing LLC, gained designated contract market and derivatives clearing organisation approvals respectively, setting up the Chicago-based company's planned move into the US market.
STX does not currently operate in the United States but has run the only licensed and regulated sports trading exchange in Ontario since 2023, listing contracts on football, basketball, baseball and hockey. Chief executive Justin Deutsch said the firm wants the best builders to have the stability and support they need as the next phase of financial-contracts innovation unfolds. STX has not set a launch date for its US platform.