TLDR
- Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley sold his Polymarket stake after guidance from the NFL.
- The NBA signed a deal with the CFTC naming Kalshi and Polymarket as preferred prediction market partners.
- Utah filed criminal charges against Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and COO Luana Lopes Lara.
- Kalshi raised $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation, up from $22 billion in May.
- Hackers drained about $2.73 million from Polymarket accounts, and at least 689 accounts have been refunded.
Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley has sold his stake in Polymarket. He said the NFL told him to unload the investment before the regular season started.
Barkley, a three-time Pro Bowler, shared the news with Front Office Sports. The size of his investment was never made public. “I was in it before, but no bueno,” Barkley said.
The NFL opposes proposed rules from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on sports event contracts. The league does not appear close to a deal with any prediction market.
Leagues Take Different Paths on Prediction Markets
The NBA has taken a different approach. This week, the league signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the CFTC that sets up a framework for event contracts on NBA games.
Under the deal, the NBA named Kalshi and Polymarket as its preferred prediction market partners. The league also gained veto power to block contracts it finds objectionable.
Barkley’s exit contrasts with LeBron James, another Philadelphia athlete. Last month, James signed with Polymarket after his multi-year contract with DraftKings expired.
James, the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, signed weeks before his first regular-season game with the Philadelphia 76ers. He joins Eli Manning, Derek Jeter and Spike Lee among celebrities who have endorsed Polymarket.
Utah Files Criminal Charges Against Kalshi Leaders
On October 29, Utah Attorney General Derek Brown filed a criminal complaint naming Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and COO Luana Lopes Lara as defendants.
The charges followed an undercover operation. An agent placed 12 sports trades on Kalshi worth a total of $114.87.
The two executives face 12 counts of online gaming promotion and one count of pattern of unlawful activity. The complaint came less than two weeks after Utah sued Kalshi, calling gambling a “public nuisance.”
“This is a crazy overreach; Utah is clearly playing politics,” a Kalshi spokesperson said. “We look forward to putting a stop to this.”
Kalshi has faced lawsuits from more than a dozen states over the past year. Federal circuit courts remain split on whether sports event contracts count as swaps.
On Thursday, Kalshi closed a $1 billion funding round at a $40 billion valuation. Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management co-led the round.
That is an 81.8% jump from the $22 billion valuation Kalshi received in May. In October 2025, the company was valued at around $5 billion.
Polymarket also dealt with a security breach on Thursday. The company halted trading on its offshore exchange for nearly four hours after hackers drained funds from hundreds of user accounts.
Tracking firms Bitquery and Arkham said hackers took about $2.73 million from roughly 737 accounts in about an hour. Polymarket blamed a flaw in DebugBear, a third-party monitoring service.
Most affected users were retail traders who lost less than $1,000 each. The median loss was $171, and about two in five accounts lost under $100. Four accounts lost more than $100,000 each, according to Bitquery.
“Anyone who has been impacted will be made whole,” Polymarket wrote on X. As of Friday afternoon, the company said at least 689 affected accounts had been refunded in full and that it is working with law enforcement on an active investigation.
