Polymarket has taken Ohio officials to federal court after the state ordered it to stop offering sports event contracts without an Ohio sports betting licence. QCX LLC, which operates as Polymarket US, filed the complaint on Oct. 16 in the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, naming interim Attorney General Andy Wilson, Ohio Casino Control Commission Executive Director Andromeda Morrison, and the commission’s members, and asking for preliminary and permanent injunctions.
The trouble started with a cease-and-desist letter on Oct. 2, which gave Polymarket 14 days to confirm it had pulled its sports contracts for Ohio customers. Coinbase, Gemini Titan, Moomoo Financial, Novig, Plus500US, ProphetX, Robinhood Derivatives, Underdog Predict, and Webull Financial got the same kind of letter, and so far only Plus500US has told the commission it’ll stop. Kalshi didn’t get one, since Ohio was already fighting it in court over the exact same issue.
Ohio’s position is pretty simple: if you’re putting money on how a game turns out, that’s sports gaming, no matter what the platform calls it. State law says anyone taking sports wagers needs an Ohio licence, has to keep customers to 21 and over, and has to make sure every wager starts, gets received, and finishes inside the state. The commission warned the companies that ignoring the letters could lead to civil or criminal enforcement, and Governor Mike DeWine has since said Wilson will start suing operators that don’t fall in line.
Polymarket’s answer is that its contracts trade on a federally regulated derivatives market under the Commodity Exchange Act, which puts them under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission rather than Ohio’s gambling laws. It’s also leaning on the Commerce Clause, calling Ohio’s demands for an in-state physical presence and in-state servers “unlawful protectionism,” since there’s no way a nationwide exchange can keep every sports wager inside a single state.
QCX has been a CFTC-designated contract market since July 9, 2025, and now runs that exchange as Polymarket US. Nobody disputes that it’s under CFTC rules. The real fight is over whether that federal oversight stops states from applying their own gambling laws to sports contracts traded on those exchanges.
Ohio already won a big round on that question on Sept. 25, when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Kalshi’s challenge to gambling enforcement in Ohio and Tennessee. The court said Kalshi hadn’t shown its sports contracts counted as “swaps” under the Commodity Exchange Act, so it couldn’t claim they belonged exclusively to the CFTC. And even if they were swaps, the judges added, federal law still didn’t override either state’s gambling laws.
The commission leaned on that ruling when it sent out this latest batch of letters, and Wilson has said the state will force the platforms into compliance. Kalshi had argued that being CFTC-regulated meant it could offer sports contracts everywhere without state licences, while Ohio said they were just sports bets that needed to follow the same rules as any licensed sportsbook. The Sixth Circuit sided with Ohio, backing the lower court’s refusal to block enforcement and tossing out an injunction Kalshi had won in Tennessee. Polymarket’s complaint tries to get around that by arguing the ruling came before the CFTC put out new documents on event contracts in October, so the legal picture has changed since.
That makes Polymarket the second CFTC-regulated exchange to go head-to-head with Ohio in just a few weeks, even though it’s fighting its own case separately from Kalshi. It filed on the same day its 14-day deadline ran out, asking the court for declaratory and injunctive relief rather than switching off its Ohio sports contracts. The case, numbered 2:26-cv-01502, sits with US District Judge Douglas Cole, and there was still no ruling on Polymarket’s request as of Oct. 21.