Cointelegraph is committed to providing independent, high-quality journalism across the crypto, blockchain, AI, and fintech industries.

All news, reviews, and analyses are produced with full journalistic independence and integrity. For more details on our standards and processes, please read our Editorial Policy.

Kalshi has secured an exclusive partnership with the U.S. Tennis Association to become the US Open’s prediction market platform partner as the tournament’s main draw gets underway in New York.

Front Office Sports reported on Aug. 30, citing two people familiar with the agreement, that the partnership took effect immediately after being finalized following last week’s qualifying rounds. Financial terms and other parameters of the agreement were not disclosed.

The deal gives Kalshi an official role at one of tennis’s four Grand Slam tournaments and was completed later than initially planned. The US Open, owned and operated by the USTA, had previously considered waiting until 2027 or later before entering a prediction market partnership.

Kalshi becomes US Open prediction market partner

Discussions in recent weeks had involved multiple prediction market platforms and focused partly on match integrity and potential partnerships beginning next year, Front Office Sports reported.

Plans changed after Craig Tiley took over as USTA CEO on July 20. Tiley played a major role in pushing for an agreement covering the 2026 tournament, according to the report.

One source told Front Office Sports that the arrangement would prevent competing prediction market companies from advertising at the US Open venue and across television coverage of the tournament, including ESPN broadcasts.

The agreement had not yet been fully reflected across the organizations’ public materials when the main draw started Sunday. Kalshi was absent from the US Open’s official partner list as of Sunday afternoon.

A Kalshi blog post published earlier that day analyzing the women’s singles tournament still carried a disclaimer saying the company was “not affiliated with the U.S. Open or WTA,” according to Front Office Sports.

Kalshi already offers a large number of contracts tied to US Open matches. Its tennis markets on Sunday included individual men’s and women’s singles matches, with some contracts recording more than $1 million in trading volume.

The US Open agreement expands a sports strategy that has increasingly put prediction market platforms alongside leagues, teams and major events.

In June, crypto.news previously reported that Kalshi had secured World Cup branding exposure through a partnership with ADI Predictstreet, FIFA’s official prediction market partner for the 2026 tournament. The arrangement placed Kalshi branding alongside ADI Predictstreet across stadium, television and digital coverage beginning with the knockout stage.

Sports partnerships have spread across the prediction market industry. Kalshi and Polymarket have partnerships with the NHL, while Polymarket has worked with Major League Baseball and the New York Yankees. Kalshi has separately announced relationships with MLB clubs including the Atlanta Braves, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants.

Novig has moved into the same market through a partnership with the New York Mets, becoming the first prediction market platform to sign an individual MLB team.

Sports contracts drive Kalshi’s expansion

Sports have become a central source of trading activity for Kalshi as the platform expands beyond the political and economic event contracts that helped prediction markets gain attention.

The company’s sports strategy was particularly visible during the FIFA World Cup. Weekly Kalshi trading volume reached a record $5.1 billion in June as activity tied to the tournament increased, while sports-related contracts had become its largest product category, according to previous coverage.

Kalshi has developed compliance systems alongside the expansion. Its sports-market surveillance includes IC360 screening and a prohibited-persons system designed to identify athletes, coaches, referees and league personnel who should not trade certain contracts. The company has paired those controls with its proprietary Poirot detection engine and Solidus Labs’ HALO surveillance platform, as detailed in crypto.news’ examination of prediction market surveillance in July.

The commercial push has continued while courts consider whether sports event contracts offered on federally regulated prediction markets can remain outside state gambling regimes.

Kalshi faces conflicting rulings over sports contracts

Two days before the US Open partnership emerged, Kalshi suffered a setback in its dispute with Nevada gaming regulators.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Aug. 28 that Kalshi had not shown that the Commodity Exchange Act was likely to preempt Nevada gaming regulations as applied to its sports event contracts. The three-judge panel affirmed in part a lower court order dissolving a preliminary injunction that had prevented Nevada from enforcing its laws against Kalshi.

Nevada’s Gaming Control Board had sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter alleging that it was operating a sports betting platform in violation of state laws and gaming regulations.

Kalshi argued that it operates as a designated contract market under the Commodity Exchange Act and that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission therefore has exclusive authority over its sports contracts.

The Ninth Circuit rejected Kalshi’s request for preliminary protection from Nevada enforcement. Its ruling found that the sports event contracts at issue did not qualify as swaps under the relevant Commodity Exchange Act definition because they were sports bets. The court remanded issues involving Kalshi’s election contracts to the district court for further consideration.

The decision came after Kalshi and Polymarket had already lost separate efforts connected with state gambling enforcement. In May, a Ninth Circuit panel denied emergency motions involving disputes in Nevada and Washington, finding that a Commodity Exchange Act preemption defense did not by itself establish federal jurisdiction.

Kalshi received a different result in the Third Circuit, which previously upheld preliminary relief preventing New Jersey regulators from enforcing state gambling laws against its sports contracts. The court found Kalshi had demonstrated a reasonable chance of succeeding on its argument that the contracts were swaps covered by federal derivatives law.

New York has produced another unfavorable ruling for the company. A federal judge in July rejected Kalshi’s injunction bid, leaving the state’s gambling-law claims against its sports event contracts in place while the litigation proceeds.

State and local challenges have continued during August. Baltimore sued Kalshi and Polymarket on Aug. 13 over alleged unlicensed sports betting, with the Kalshi complaint naming Coinbase, Robinhood and Webull because the platforms distribute its event contracts to their customers.

Baltimore alleged that contracts covering game winners, point spreads and player performances operate like sports wagers without the licenses and consumer protections required under state law. Kalshi rejected that characterization and maintained that its federal regulatory status permits it to offer the contracts.

The city is seeking statutory penalties, customer restitution and disgorgement of proceeds it alleges came from unlawful activity, along with an order preventing the companies from offering unauthorized sports betting to Baltimore residents.

Robinhood Chain recorded $2.66 million in application revenue over 24 hours on Aug. 31, according to a rolling DeFiLlama dashboard.

The reading placed the network above Hyperliquid L1 at $1.71 million, Ethereum at $1.57 million and Base at approximately $439,252. Robinhood Chain’s total was roughly 6.1 times Base’s figure during the same snapshot.

The dashboard had shown lower totals earlier in the day. That difference reflects the rolling measurement window rather than a correction or separately reported financial result.

Robinhood Chain app revenue led the snapshot

DeFiLlama’s dashboard aggregates revenue retained by applications operating on each network. Its Robinhood Chain reading increased 201% from the previous week and reached $23.23 million over 30 days.

However, the 30-day comparison presented a different ranking. Hyperliquid L1 recorded $53.6 million, while Ethereum generated $52.03 million. Robinhood Chain therefore led the daily snapshot but remained behind both networks over the longer period.

The comparison also does not mean Robinhood Markets earned more revenue than Ethereum or Hyperliquid. Application revenue belongs to individual protocols and may include several measurement methods, depending on how each service collects fees.

Three applications generated about 93% of revenue

GMGN led Robinhood Chain applications with approximately $1.11 million in 24-hour revenue. DeFiLlama defines that figure as trading fees retained by GMGN after referral commissions. Its EVM referral deduction is partly estimated using the rate measured on Solana.

Pons followed with approximately $1.03 million. Its total includes launch fees and portions of swap fees retained by the protocol. Uniswap ranked third with about $327,707.

Together, the three applications generated nearly $2.47 million, equivalent to approximately 93% of Robinhood Chain’s reported total. The concentration shows that the daily result depended heavily on trading bots, token launches and decentralized exchange activity.

Pons has been expanding its Robinhood Chain presence through an ETH-based bonding curve and Uniswap v4 integration

App revenue differs from blockchain revenue

Application revenue measures fees retained by protocols after payments to liquidity providers, referrers or other participants. It differs from gross user fees, transaction volume and revenue retained by the underlying blockchain.

DeFiLlama separately estimated Robinhood Chain’s own 24-hour revenue at about $963,612. Its definition covers transaction gas fees after Ethereum execution costs, blob costs and the Arbitrum Expansion Program share.

The distinction matters because Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 built with Arbitrum technology. Robinhood launched its public mainnet on July 1 for tokenized assets and decentralized financial applications.

Uniswap became one of its main liquidity venues at launch. In related coverage, crypto.news reported that cumulative tokenized-stock trading through Uniswap had surpassed $1 billion by Aug. 21.

Longer data will test whether the lead continues

Robinhood Chain would need to maintain stronger seven-day and 30-day results before the daily reading could indicate a sustained change in network rankings. Daily revenue can rise sharply during token launches or periods of concentrated speculative trading.

Future assessments should examine whether revenue spreads across more applications, whether active users continue returning and whether transaction activity persists without short-term incentives. GMGN and Pons currently account for most of the total, making the network sensitive to changes in either platform.

The earlier $1.84 million reading and the later $2.66 million total demonstrate how quickly a rolling dashboard can change. Articles comparing networks should therefore identify the measurement time and avoid presenting the figure as a completed financial period.

Polygon Labs has patched several security flaws across its proof-of-stake network through two coordinated hard forks, including a vulnerability that could have forced the full validator set to perform costly processing from a single crafted transaction.

Polygon’s Validators Support Team disclosed the fixes in an Aug. 27 forum post after the Austin and Kyoto hard forks had already been tested and activated. The team said consensus-affecting security fixes were deployed privately, validated on the Amoy testnet and disclosed only after the mainnet fleet was protected.

The vulnerabilities affected Bor, Polygon PoS’s execution client, and Heimdall, which handles validator coordination and other consensus functions. Polygon said it found no evidence that any of the issues had been exploited or caused disruption on mainnet.

Polygon hard forks close block processing flaws

The Austin hard fork upgraded Bor to version 2.10.0 and addressed two denial-of-service paths tied to block processing.

One involved state-sync events used for L1-to-L2 bridge deposits. Such events can execute contract code and precompiles, but their execution was not subject to an effective per-block gas bound. Austin introduced a limit on how much gas state-sync events can consume within a block, preventing them from exhausting processing resources.

A separate weakness involved TxDependency data used during block processing. A malicious block producer could supply an oversized data field, potentially causing excessive memory allocation and crashing peers processing the block.

Polygon described both issues as block-processing denial-of-service vectors instead of consensus-correctness flaws and said neither had caused known disruption before the patches were deployed.

The Kyoto hard fork, which moved Heimdall to version 0.11.0, covered a larger group of input-validation and consensus-hardening fixes.

Among them, Polygon identified deeply nested google.protobuf.Any fields as the most severe vulnerability in the batch. Heimdall transactions can wrap messages inside Any fields, which in turn can be nested inside one another.

Without a depth limit, an attacker could construct a transaction containing deeply nested fields at relatively little cost while forcing every validator processing it to carry out substantial decoding work. Polygon said the flaw provided a permissionless route for imposing costly, coordinated processing across the validator set.

Kyoto added a byte-level scan that rejects transactions once nesting exceeds a defined threshold. The check applies at both mempool admission and the consensus processing stage so the same transaction cannot be accepted through one path and rejected through another.

Other Heimdall fixes covered milestone accounting, checkpoint processing and L1 event replay. Failed future-span creation can now degrade and retry at the next boundary instead of blocking a milestone commit, while new replay keys address an edge case in which distinct L1 events could otherwise collide.

Older Polygon nodes have fallen out of consensus

Both hard forks are mandatory for operators that want to remain on the canonical Polygon PoS network.

Bor v2.10.0 is required for all nodes, while Heimdall v0.11.0 applies to validators and full nodes. Polygon said operators running versions from before the activation heights have already forked away from canonical consensus and must update their software to rejoin the network.

The changes were delivered as binary upgrades, meaning operators do not need to migrate state, modify the genesis configuration or perform a full resync. Nodes that have fallen out of consensus can upgrade and roll back to the appropriate pre-hard-fork height before catching up with the canonical chain.

Polygon has previously used hard forks to address problems affecting its PoS infrastructure. In September 2025, developers executed a hard fork after a software bug caused transaction finality delays of as much as 15 minutes.

The earlier incident affected validator synchronization and local fast finality while block production and Ethereum checkpointing continued. Bor and Heimdall updates were deployed to restore milestone processing, state synchronization and consensus finalization.

A month later, the Rio mainnet upgrade introduced witness-based stateless validation and a Validator-Elected Block Producer model as Polygon continued changing how its PoS network processes and verifies transactions.

Polygon has continued changing its PoS infrastructure

Network performance remained another focus in 2026. In May, crypto.news previously reported that Polygon had reduced block time to an average of 1.75 seconds, its first block-time reduction since launch.

Polygon software engineer Lucca Martins said at the time that the change raised theoretical throughput to roughly 3,260 transactions per second and allowed the network to process about 14% more payments per second. The work formed part of Polygon’s push to support higher transaction volumes from stablecoin payments and decentralized finance activity.

The latest security fixes arrived after Polygon completed the replacement of MATIC with POL as the native gas and staking token on its PoS network. The migration began in September 2024 as part of the Polygon 2.0 roadmap, with MATIC held directly on Polygon PoS converted to POL at a one-to-one ratio.

The original MATIC-to-POL plan designated POL as the token used for gas payments and staking, while its proposed functions were expected to expand as Polygon developed its staking and aggregated-chain architecture.

Changes have extended to Polygon Labs itself. In July, the company cut another round of jobs while completing the integration of crypto exchange Coinme. CEO Marc Boiron said the restructuring was designed to support profitability by 2027 as Polygon Labs moved toward a payments-focused business model.

POL showed little positive reaction to the security disclosure. The token was trading near $0.09983 on Aug. 30, down about 2.3% over the previous 24 hours and 6.8% over seven days, according to CoinGecko data provided with the report. Its price remained about 60.8% lower than a year earlier, giving the token a market capitalization of roughly $1.07 billion.