Prices fetched August 28, 2026, 7:42 p.m. UTC, and re-checked unchanged an hour later. Panel run the same day.
The Belt Nobody Has Defended
Tom Aspinall has been the undisputed UFC heavyweight champion since June 21, 2025. In the 14 months since, he has not successfully defended it once. He has, in fact, competed exactly once: a title fight against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321 on October 25, 2025 that lasted four minutes and 35 seconds and ended with Gane poking both of Aspinall's eyes and Aspinall unable to continue.
Kalshi, the federally regulated exchange where you can trade a contract on who holds that belt at noon on New Year's Eve, prices Aspinall at 60¢ bid and 63¢ ask, which means 60¢ is the most anyone is currently offering to pay for the contract and 63¢ is the least anyone will sell it for. On a prediction market a price in cents is simply a probability: a contract in the low 60s means the market gives him roughly a 62% chance of still being champion on December 31, 2026.
Sixty-two percent is a strange number for a man who has not won a fight in more than two years. It is a stranger number once you read what the contract actually says, because the rules do something to this board that almost nobody trading it seems to have priced. We showed the same board to a panel of AI models without letting them see a single market quote, and on one fighter they came back a long way from where the money sits.
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What This Contract Actually Pays On
Every Kalshi market has a one-line summary, and underneath it a contract-terms document that is the thing that actually decides settlement. The summary here reads: "If Tom Aspinall is the UFC Heavyweight Title on Dec 31, 2026 at 12:00 PM ET, then the market resolves to Yes." Read only that and you would think a belt is a belt.
The TITLEHOLDER contract terms that govern this series say something much narrower. Four provisions, verbatim:
- "Only the undisputed champion counts unless specifically includes 'Interim'"
- " is only an interim champion when an undisputed champion exists", listed under the situations that resolve No
- "If the title is vacant on , only 'Vacant' or 'No person' resolves to Yes"
- "For title fights occurring ON : the result must be official by 12:00 PM ET. Otherwise, market resolves to the previous champion"
This market's title is "UFC Heavyweight Title." It does not include the word "Interim." The gap between the summary and the terms is the reason we have written a whole page on how Kalshi's rules run three layers deep, and this board is a live example of why that matters.
Two consequences follow, and they run in opposite directions.
The first is that Ciryl Gane, who is the reigning interim UFC heavyweight champion, does not settle Yes for holding that belt. To settle Yes he has to take the undisputed title from Aspinall, or be promoted to it. The interim strap on his shoulder is worth exactly nothing to this contract on its own.
The second is quieter and cuts against everyone. Kalshi lists 11 contracts on this event, one per named fighter. There is no "Vacant" contract and no "No person" contract. If Aspinall is stripped, or retires, or walks, and nobody has won the belt or been promoted to undisputed champion by noon on December 31, then every single one of those 11 contracts resolves No and nobody holding one is paid.
Tom Aspinall Wins This Market By Doing Nothing
Aspinall's path to a Yes is the only passive one on the board. He does not have to fight. He does not have to win. He has to not lose the belt and not be stripped of it for another 125 days.
The passive path is worth restating, because his record reads like a fighter you would back for entirely different reasons. Aspinall is 15-3 with one no contest, with 12 of his 15 wins by knockout and three by submission, and he holds the UFC record for shortest average fight time. He knocked out Curtis Blaydes in 60 seconds at UFC 304 and Sergei Pavlovich in 69 seconds at UFC 295. None of that is what this contract is about. This contract is about whether a governing body still recognises his name on December 31.
The case against him is the calendar and his health. Aspinall was diagnosed with bilateral traumatic Brown's syndrome after the eye pokes at UFC 321 and needed three surgeries. Per Forbes on August 26, he was medically cleared in July 2026 and is in discussions with the UFC about a return, but no bout is booked. The same report notes his manager, Eddie Hearn, had offered to buy out his UFC contract; Aspinall answered the departure reports publicly with "I'm not leaving the UFC."
There is a documented, sourced dispute sitting underneath all of this, and it is not a small one. Aspinall accused Gane of deliberate fouling, telling CBS Sports on November 30, 2025: "The guy was cheating from the first second. The way that he wanted to win that fight was to have me compromised by cheating." Gane, asked about the accusation, told reporters in June: "That is his opinion. You have a beautiful, professional referee. The referee told me nothing because I respect the rules. It's just an opinion." He had apologised for the poke on the night. Aspinall also went at UFC president Dana White, who had said after the fight that "Tom didn't want to continue in the fight" and that there was no damage to the eye. Aspinall told ESPN on December 3, 2025: "I was very disappointed, yeah. Very disappointed ... It didn't help the cause." He added: "[White] started giving updates that there was nothing wrong with my eye, when that isn't the case ... I've done a lot for the UFC, so, yeah, disappointing." The foul was treated as accidental, the bout was ruled a no contest, and Aspinall kept the belt.
We are not adjudicating any of that. What matters for a price is that the two men who have to be in a cage together for this board to move are, on the public record, in an unresolved argument about how their last meeting ended, and that no bout between them is publicly booked.
Ciryl Gane's Interim Belt Does Not Settle This Market
Gane won the interim title on June 14, 2026 at UFC Freedom 250, the card the UFC staged on the South Lawn of the White House, stopping Alex Pereira by TKO at 1:27 of round two. The Frenchman is 14-2 with one no contest, and the UFC ranks him the number-one heavyweight contender.
His contract needs one of two things to happen. He beats Aspinall in a unification bout that finishes before noon on December 31, or Aspinall vacates or is stripped and the UFC promotes Gane to undisputed. The second route has direct precedent: Aspinall himself was promoted from interim to undisputed champion on June 21, 2025 when Jon Jones vacated the title on retirement.
The first route runs into a wall made of dates. Between now and settlement the UFC has these events scheduled: eight Fight Nights, UFC 331 on September 19, UFC 332 on October 3, UFC 333 on October 24, UFC 334 on November 14 at Madison Square Garden, and UFC 335 on December 12 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
UFC 331, 332 and 333 already have bouts booked, including their title fights: flyweight on 331, featherweight and bantamweight on 333, no title bout at all on 332. The heavyweight bouts booked across those three cards are Gable Steveson against Sean Sharaf, Tai Tuivasa against Robelis Despaigne, Johnny Walker against Mick Parkin, and Alexander Volkov against Rizvan Kuniev. Not one is for a belt.
That leaves UFC 334 and UFC 335, both announced on August 22 and both with zero bouts booked. UFC 334, which the UFC has branded Polymarket UFC 334 after its title sponsor, is 78 days away and 47 days clear of settlement. The prices on this page are Kalshi's throughout; the sponsorship is the other exchange's. UFC 335 lands 19 days before the contract expires. Those two empty cards are the entire realistic window in which this board can change hands. Two of the seats argued that an empty Madison Square Garden card creates its own pressure to book a headliner; that is their reading of the calendar, not an announcement.
The Board
Seven of the panel's nine seats returned a board on this market; the other two did not run. The seven were given a deterministically fetched data card: the contract terms, the official UFC rankings, every listed fighter's full professional record and last three bouts, the complete scheduled-event calendar with every announced bout, and a dated news record with sources. They were shown no market prices at all. They priced all 11 fighters plus a twelfth bucket for "nobody on this board," in one pass, then read each other's anonymised reasoning and were allowed to revise.
| Outcome | Rank | Market price (what buyers bid / what sellers ask) | Panel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tom Aspinall | Champion | 60¢ / 63¢ | 63.0% |
| Ciryl Gane | No. 1 (interim champ) | 38¢ / 39¢ | 25.5% |
| Josh Hokit | No. 4 | 4¢ / 6¢ | 1.0% |
| Alexander Volkov | No. 2 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 2.0% |
| Sergei Pavlovich | No. 3 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 1.0% |
| Alex Pereira | Unranked at heavyweight | 1¢ / 2¢ | 0.35% |
| Jon Jones | Unranked | 0¢ / 1¢ | 0.3% |
| Curtis Blaydes | No. 6 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 0.3% |
| Waldo Cortes-Acosta | No. 5 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 0.3% |
| Jailton Almeida | Unranked | 0¢ / 1¢ | 0.0% |
| Marcin Tybura | No. 15 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 0.1% |
| Nobody On This Board | No contract exists | not listed | 5.0% |
A note on that price column, because it flatters the board. Only four of the 11 contracts have a real quote with a bid behind it: Aspinall, Gane, Hokit and Pereira. The other seven sit at zero bid and one cent ask. All of them have traded at some point — each carries open contracts — but right now the quote is one-sided: you can buy at a penny, and nobody is offering to take it back off you. Midpoints across all 11 sum to 110¢ rather than 100¢; on the bid side the board sums to 103¢. The midpoints running 10¢ over 100¢ while the bids run 3¢ over is the board's spread — the gap between the two sides of every quote — rather than a forecast, and it is why reading the vacancy scenario straight off these prices gives you less than nothing. The panel column does not add to 100 either: it is a median of the seats rather than an average, and it sums to about 94% alongside the 5% bucket.
More live boards from the same panel: UFC lightweight title odds, Justin Gaethje 84¢ · UFC welterweight title odds, Islam Makhachev 89¢ · Makhachev vs. Machado Garry market guide. Prices fetched August 28, 2026.
Here is every seat's number on the two contracts that carry the board.
| Seat | Aspinall | Gane | Nobody on this board |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 64% | 25.5% | 3% |
| Claude Fable | 62% | 22% | 10% |
| Claude Opus | 73% | 21% | 4% |
| Claude Sonnet | 62% | 27% | 6% |
| Gemini | 65% | 27% | 5% |
| Grok | 60% | 25% | 5% |
| Kimi | 63% | 29% | 3% |
| Panel Middle Answer | 63% | 25.5% | 5% |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Fable 84% on 807 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 5,151 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 82% on 852 graded calls · Claude Opus 84% on 877 graded calls · Kimi 82% on 2,576 graded calls · Grok 84% on 4,427 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Every number in this piece gets graded in public once the market settles; the running tally is on the full graded scoreboard.
The panel and the market agree almost exactly on Aspinall. They part company on Gane, where the market's midpoint sits at 38.5¢ and the panel's blended middle answer is 25.5%. Both numbers come from the same facts and the panel has a mixed record against this market: across thousands of graded calls it loses most of its disagreements with the price. The gap is a difference of reading, not a signal. What the seats read differently is the phrase "only the undisputed champion counts," and how much of Gane's 38.5¢ is people paying for a belt he already has.
Josh Hokit, And The Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss
The most interesting contract on this board is the one priced at a nickel.
Josh Hokit is 10-0 as a professional and ranked fourth at heavyweight, less than 10 months after his UFC debut in November 2025. He beat Curtis Blaydes by unanimous decision at UFC 327 on April 11, 2026, then stopped Derrick Lewis by TKO at 4:09 of round two at UFC Freedom 250 on June 14. Six of his 10 wins are knockouts, three are submissions. He was a walk-on at Fresno State who played fullback and wrestled, and became the school's first wrestling All-American since 2003.
More contracts are open on him than on the champion. Hokit's market carries roughly 27,400 open contracts against about 35,000 in lifetime volume; Aspinall's carries about 17,000 open against 39,700 lifetime. Those are contract counts, not dollars, and at a nickel apiece Hokit's open position is worth a fraction of Aspinall's. Still, more people are holding a live ticket on the fourth-ranked heavyweight than on the man wearing the belt.
None of that moves the seats. Their middle number on Hokit is 1.0%, against a 4¢ bid and 6¢ ask, and the reason every seat gives is the same one: no title slot has been announced for him, and only two cards remain. Nothing is booked for him, and the two events with room are 78 and 106 days away. Grok, which ran him highest in the first round, still called him only "the best longshot" on the board rather than a live contender.
Two other names deserve a sentence each, because their prices are stories rather than forecasts.
Alex Pereira's contract has traded roughly 95,700 lifetime (more than double any other name here, with about 43,400 contracts still open) and it now sits at one cent bid, two cents ask. The price is the residue of a bet that already lost: Pereira moved up from light heavyweight to challenge for the interim belt in June, got stopped in the second round, and is not ranked at heavyweight at all. Jon Jones, who has not fought since November 2024 and vacated this belt on retirement in June 2025, still has about 18,700 contracts open at a penny. Neither is a forecast. Both are what a famous name looks like after the reason to hold it has gone.
Where The Panel Changed Its Mind
After round one, every seat read the others' reasoning with the model names stripped out and was allowed to revise. All seven moved or explicitly declined to, and the argument they were all responding to was the same one.
The biggest single move came from Gemini, which pushed Aspinall from 57% to 65%:
I revised Aspinall up and Gane down, adjusting for the likelihood of the unification bout actually occurring in time. Forecaster D also convincingly pointed out UFC precedent (e.g., Jones vacating and Aspinall being promoted), meaning if Aspinall is stripped due to buyout rumors, Gane likely gets promoted rather than the title going vacant.
— Gemini
Grok took the same precedent argument and spent it differently, moving three points out of the nobody-on-this-board bucket and into Gane:
Round 1 already noted Jones→Aspinall elevation as a Gane path but still put ~8% on NO LISTED; peers B/D correctly pressed that the same precedent routes most strip/vacate outcomes to the interim, so I reallocated ~3pp from NO LISTED (8→5) into Gane (22→25).
— Grok
Claude Fable, which carried the highest vacancy number in round one at 11%, heard the same argument and mostly refused it, on a distinction nobody else drew:
That is fair and I shaded Gane up slightly for it, but it does not collapse the bucket: the 2025 promotion followed a voluntary retirement, not a contract dispute.
— Claude Fable
And Claude Sonnet held its numbers flat and said why, which is the answer this section exists to capture:
No peer surfaced a fact outside the shared data card (no undisclosed booking, no new strip precedent, no different medical detail) — only different weights on the same two judgment calls.
— Claude Sonnet
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
Four things, each of them checkable, with the direction each pushes the number.
- An Official Aspinall Vs. Gane Unification Booking For UFC 334 Or UFC 335. Every one of the seven seats named this as the single biggest mover, and it cuts both ways: it takes Aspinall's passive path away and turns the board into something much closer to a two-man fight. Pushes Aspinall down, Gane up.
- UFC Stripping Aspinall, Or Aspinall Vacating. The Hearn buyout report is the live version of this. Precedent says most of that probability flows to Gane by promotion rather than to vacancy, since that is exactly how Aspinall got the belt. Pushes Gane up, and pushes the no-contract bucket up.
- UFC 334 Announcing A Different Headliner. Madison Square Garden needs a main event, and if it goes to another division the window narrows to UFC 335 alone. Pushes Aspinall up.
- Any New Heavyweight Title Booking Involving A Fighter Outside The Top Two. Nothing on the current calendar supports it, but a title fight built around a contender who is not Gane would give one of the penny contracts an actual path. Pushes the field up off zero.
The Dates That Decide It
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| September 19, October 3, October 24, 2026 | UFC 331, 332 and 333. Cards already built; no heavyweight title bout on any of them. |
| November 14, 2026 | UFC 334, Madison Square Garden. Announced, zero bouts booked. 47 days before settlement. |
| December 12, 2026 | UFC 335, T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas. Announced, zero bouts booked. 19 days before settlement. |
| December 31, 2026, 12:00 P.m. ET | Settlement. A title fight result must be official by this moment or the market resolves to the previous champion. |
We re-score this board whenever the story moves, and a booking announcement is exactly the kind of move that triggers it. Everything above is as of August 28, 2026.
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The Bottom Line
The heavyweight division has a champion who has not defended his title, a challenger holding a belt the contract does not recognise, an undefeated fourth-ranked contender with more open contracts riding on him than either of them, and two empty pay-per-view cards standing between all of it and settlement.
The market and the panel agree on the man at the top and disagree about the man chasing him. If you take one thing from this page, make it the sentence buried in the contract terms rather than any number on the board: on this market an interim champion is not a champion, and a vacant belt pays nobody at all.
Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange and its event contracts are open to traders 18+. Nothing here is a recommendation to take a position.
Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. T-Mobile Arena photo by Ron Mader, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0; photos cropped, toned, and composited.
