Rent is due. Tuition is expensive. Good-paying jobs are hard to find.
For a financially struggling college student, the promise of making hundreds of dollars from a few taps on a phone can sound like a great opportunity to capitalize on. But when an app makes gambling seem more sophisticated than it is, the line between investing and betting becomes dangerously blurred.
Kalshi is an app where you bet money on the outcome of real-world events: who wins tonight’s game, what the weather does, who wins an election. Each bet is called a “contract.” If your prediction is correct, you get paid. If you’re wrong, you lose what you wagered.
Kalshi argues that it is a commodities trader, which is a fancy way of saying it rewards users for predicting a specific outcome of something over a short-term movement. Similar to every casino game ever, which is why there should be no issue calling it gambling. It’s also dangerous to convince a financially struggling 19-year-old that a few taps on their phone could solve their money problems.
But the commodities distinction only identifies who is on the other side of the transaction. As a process, it is still a gamble. In order to gain money from a trade, someone else has to lose money. Buying a stock, by contrast, means partial ownership of a real company with the potential to grow in value. One bet on the outcome of a football game, comparatively, creates no comparable ownership or underlying asset.
Sports are where this distinction matters most.
Sports occupy an enormous place in American culture, making them a natural entry point for platforms like Kalshi. The app taps into the passion people already have for their favorite teams, athletes and games, turning familiar sporting events into financial wagers. In doing so, it makes gambling feel less like gambling and more like an extension of being a sports fan.
About 80% of Kalshi’s trading is reportedly tied to sports, including parlays, according to a CNN analysis.
Parlays bundle several individual outcomes into a single bet. Although they offer larger potential payouts, users lose the entire wager if even one outcome goes against them. That’s why “parlay not hit” has become an online joke about losing a bet, extending beyond the realm of sports.
Of course, it’s funny until it’s your rent money.
The age restrictions make the issue even more concerning. Traditional sports betting platforms generally require customers to be at least 21, while Kalshi allows users to trade at 18, according to OddsIndex, a U.S.-market-focused sports betting information platform. Users under 21 have gambled an estimated $3.9 billion on sports contracts this year, increasing total gambling volume by 79% at approximately $5 billion, according to Fortune.
In other words, a significant amount of activity is coming from young adults who would be legally barred from using traditional sports betting platforms in most states. The very age group that gambling restrictions are designed to protect is now participating in a multibillion-dollar sports betting market.
If the platform were simply a niche tool for financial professionals, it wouldn’t need to rely so heavily on TikTok and college campuses. Yet users have been exposed to advertisements promoting gambling on the app as a “money hack” that could flip $20 into hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Calling a bet a “trade” makes it sound like a legitimate investing skill. Calling a loss a “bad trade” makes it easier to rationalize trying again. What might otherwise feel like gambling begins to resemble an opportunity to get ahead financially. For someone already struggling to make ends meet, that distinction can have real consequences.
On the other hand, Kalshi’s supporters argue that adults should be free to make their own financial decisions. One poll, commissioned by the company, found that 89% of voters would participate in prediction markets including their own, but the fact that adults support having access to a product does not settle questions about how that product is marketed, who it reaches or what safeguards should accompany it.
The company has pledged $2 million to the nonprofit National Council on Problem Gambling, maybe for their complicity or otherwise personal interest. Still, prevention and consumer protections should not come as an afterthought once a platform has already attracted millions of users.
Meanwhile, the fight over who should regulate Kalshi is already underway. The company maintains that it answers to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency overseeing derivatives markets, rather than individual state gambling regulators. But 40 states and Washington, D.C., have challenged the company’s position in a letter to the agency.
Nevada’s gaming regulators have also argued that Kalshi’s sports contracts constitute gambling and require a state gaming license.
Whatever the eventual regulatory outcome, college students deserve stronger consumer protections. The minimum age for sports-related wagers should be 21, platforms should be required to implement the identity-verification checks used by traditional sports betting platforms and marketing that recruits students through college campuses should be restricted.
If Kalshi wants the benefits of operating as a financial trading platform, it should also be held to meaningful standards of transparency and consumer protection. For students already struggling to make ends meet, the last thing they need is another company profiting from the hope that they can beat the odds.
Copy edited by Jori Johnson
