Kalshi has just donated $2 million to the National Council on Problem Gambling, badged as a “financial trader health and safety initiative.” On paper, it looks like responsibility. Look closer, and it raises more questions than it answers.
The Duck Test
Kalshi insists its prediction markets are trading, not gambling. But as our panel put it on this week’s Sunday Project: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. People are placing bets on outcomes and chasing losses exactly as they would on any sportsbook. Calling it “trading” doesn’t change what happens in the brain of someone who can’t stop: the same cycle of placing a bet, chasing the loss, and needing the next contract to feel okay again plays out whether you call it a “trade” or a “wager.”
Who's Funding the Message?
This isn’t an isolated case. NCPG’s funding already includes major operators like FanDuel and DraftKings, plus reported contributions from the NFL running into the millions. But Kalshi’s donation has struck a different nerve, and it’s worth asking why. FanDuel and DraftKings are licensed gambling operators — regulated as such, and required to contribute to harm-reduction efforts as a condition of doing business.
Kalshi is different: it has spent months arguing, including in court, that what it offers isn’t gambling at all, but federally regulated trading, which lets it sidestep state gambling laws, licensing requirements, and consumer protections like self-exclusion registers entirely. Writing a $2 million cheque to the leading problem gambling charity while denying it operates in that space looks less like an operator stepping up and more like a company buying the credibility of “responsible gambling” without accepting any of the regulation that’s supposed to come with it.
That raises the real question: can an organisation set up to represent people harmed by gambling stay independent when its budget increasingly depends on the industry causing that harm? Transparency and public trust matter more here than the size of any single cheque — and right now, it’s not clear whose interests are actually being served.
The Gap Between Headlines and Lived Reality
While Kalshi’s $2 million made headlines, one of our own advocates — nearly 33 years into recovery and still actively helping others — applied to NCPG for a few hundred dollars in scholarship support to attend their own conference, and was turned down.
That contrast says everything. Meanwhile, clinicians on our panel described what they’re actually seeing in treatment rooms this year alone: a 25-year-old $1.5 million in debt threatening suicide, a client turning up to a session with a gun to his head, another who jumped from a six-storey building, and a client lost entirely to the cumulative toll of untreated gambling disorder. That is the distance between a press release about “health and safety” and what problem gambling actually does to a person and their family.
A Couple of Million Doesn't Touch the Real Problem
As one of our contributors pointed out, the deeper issue predates any single donation. Sports governing bodies have been drawn so close to the gambling industry that they now profit alongside it rather than policing it. Prop bets on rebounds, assists, and game-winning plays have turned fans into customers and, in some cases, created direct incentives for match-fixing. Giving money to a prevention charity doesn’t unwind any of that. It’s a downstream gesture toward an upstream problem — one the donor itself helped create.
What Real Accountability Would Look Like
Nobody on our panel is against gambling operators funding research and treatment in principle. The problem is when that funding buys silence, access, or a seat at the table instead of genuine change. If Kalshi, or any operator, wants its money to mean something, that means public disclosure of the terms attached, independent oversight of how it’s spent, and — most importantly — a willingness to change the products and marketing driving the harm in the first place. A cheque with a press release attached isn’t that. It’s reputation management dressed up as responsibility.
We’ll keep asking the question NCPG’s donors would rather nobody asked: who’s funding the message, and what does that funding buy?
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