Why Is Kalshi Saying A School District Is The Source For Who Wins A Football Game?

Kalshi started listing new NFL betting markets this week. One of them — for the point total in the game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Chargers — listed the “San Francisco Unified School District” as the source for verifying the outcome:

The screenshot is from earlier this morning. This is, of course, a ridiculous source; this is a mistake somewhere in Kalshi’s process for listing markets.

Every market at Kalshi (and all prediction markets) has language about how the outcome is verified. The market did get updated this morning, either because I pointed it out or because someone on Kalshi’s Discord did. The source for the resolution of the market is now the NFL.

A Kalshi spokesperson offered this when I asked about how this could happen:

“When we see frontend display issues like this (importantly, this is distinct from having an error with the actual contract itself, which serves as the resolution source with the CFTC and was never incorrect), we work immediately to update them with the proper text, as we did in this situation.”

The spokesperson also clarified that it was “a simple copy error” that led to the mistake.

None of that really addresses my question of how this could happen, nor does it make the mistake more excusable, because it belies a level of carelessness that Kalshi insists doesn’t exist in the realm of prediction markets regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. What was the Kalshi employee “copying” when they created the display language for this market, for instance? Even if it was copied, isn’t there some sort of quality control that would flag this as wrong?

The school district wasn’t in the “full rules” that are also included with every market; here are the rules linked on the Niners-Chargers market:

I can’t verify how long the market displayed the SFUSD as the outcome source, but you can find remnants of it for the core market for NFL points totals — listed earlier this week — on Google search:

I don’t expect prediction market platforms to be perfect, but that’s a pretty wild mistake that makes it hard to believe actual human beings are doing the quality control on spawning markets. (I make typos and mistakes on this newsletter all the time, I am sure; but I am one person, and not a market where billions of dollars are being traded.)

For what it’s worth, the San Francisco Unified School District is a prohibited class in the “Kalshi Source Agency Trading Prohibitions” for markets about the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index:

(It’s also weird it’s literally the first listing in a document that is otherwise in alphabetical order by the name of the organization.)

As Kalshi continues to ramp up its number of markets — and the trading volume increases in parallel — consternation about the rules is likely to continue. Last month, I covered how Kalshi had what I guess is a “display issue” on a market about X/Twitter’s CEO leaving:

That market is still open since she hasn’t been “replaced,” even though the market originally asked only whether she would leave. (She definitely left, but the full underlying rules indicated that a new CEO would have to be hired in order to resolve to “yes.” This was covered in a paywalled Bloomberg story as well.

In any event, Kalshi traders won’t have to visit the SFUSD website to find out who won the Niners game this weekend.