UFC Heavyweight Title Odds: A Champion Who Hasn't Defended

Prices re-fetched September 14, 2026, 8:27 p.m. Eastern. Panel verdicts were generated August 28, price-blind, and stand as published; the board, the trade tape and the calendar below are current.

Who is the UFC heavyweight champion? As of Monday night, September 14, 2026, nobody holds the undisputed belt. Tom Aspinall, champion since June 21, 2025 and never once a successful defender of it, vacated the title on Instagram early Monday, writing that "ongoing complications with my eyes mean I cannot get medically cleared to fight right now." Ciryl Gane holds the interim belt, and every report on the record expects the UFC to promote him; as of this read the UFC has not said so. Kalshi's year-end board answered before the promotion did. Aspinall's contract, 42¢ bid at 2 a.m., has no bid at all tonight; the first sale printed at 4:03 a.m., an hour before the first report in our record. Gane's spiked from 34¢ to an 85¢ print, first at 6:09 a.m. and again in size at 8:56 a.m., and sits at 64¢ bid and 67¢ ask at the evening read. By 1 p.m. Kalshi had listed a twelfth contract, "Vacant," that did not exist when this page was written. The full board, the hour-by-hour tape of Monday, and the panel's August 28 read, which this week finally got tested, are below.

The Belt Nobody Has Defended

In nearly 15 months as undisputed champion, Aspinall competed exactly once: the UFC 321 title fight on October 25, 2025 lasted four minutes and 35 seconds and ended with Gane poking both of his eyes and Aspinall unable to continue. Monday was day 324 without a fight, and the day the belt went back to the promotion.

Kalshi, the federally regulated exchange where you can trade a contract on who holds that belt at noon on New Year's Eve, now prices Gane at 64¢ bid and 67¢ ask. The bid is the most anyone is currently offering to pay for the contract and the ask is the least anyone will sell it for. On a prediction market a price in cents is simply a probability, so that quote says the market puts Gane's chance of being the undisputed champion on December 31, 2026 at about two in three. On August 28, when this page was written, the same contract was 38¢ bid and 39¢ ask and Aspinall's was 60¢ and 63¢. At 2 a.m. Monday, our last read, Aspinall was still the favorite at 42¢ bid and 52¢ ask, and Gane was 34¢ and 39¢. Two hours later the champion's bid had collapsed.

That is the whole move, and this time the reason for it is on the record in the champion's own words. The section below puts the statement next to the trades, because the timing is the one part of a price move that can always be sourced, and this is the rare week where the cause can be too.

New to this kind of market? Our guide on how to trade sports on Kalshi walks through the mechanics in four steps.

What Moved On September 14

Here is the top of the board on the four occasions this page has been read. Every price is a Kalshi bid and ask in cents. The first three columns are the ones this page has already published; the last is tonight.

Contract	Aug. 28	Sept. 10	Sept. 14, 2 a.m.	Sept. 14, 8:27 p.m.	Move in the bid on Monday
Ciryl Gane	38¢ / 39¢	27¢ / 28¢	34¢ / 39¢	64¢ / 67¢	+30¢
Alexander Volkov	0¢ / 1¢	0¢ / 1¢	0¢ / 1¢	14¢ / 19¢	+14¢
Josh Hokit	4¢ / 6¢	7¢ / 9¢	5¢ / 7¢	12¢ / 16¢	+7¢
Alex Pereira	1¢ / 2¢	2¢ / 5¢	1¢ / 2¢	9¢ / 11¢	+8¢
Vacant	not listed	not listed	not listed	1¢ / 2¢	new
Tom Aspinall	60¢ / 63¢	35¢ / 59¢	42¢ / 52¢	0¢ / 1¢	−42¢
Sergei Pavlovich	0¢ / 1¢	0¢ / 1¢	0¢ / 1¢	0¢ / 4¢	0¢
Jon Jones	0¢ / 1¢	0¢ / 2¢	0¢ / 2¢	0¢ / 1¢	0¢
Four Others (Blaydes, Cortes-Acosta, Almeida, Tybura)	0¢ / 1¢ each	0¢ / 1¢ each	0¢ / 1¢ each	0¢ / 1¢ each	0¢

The row to read is not Gane's. It is the three below him. Volkov, Hokit and Pereira between them carry 35¢ of bid tonight, and at 2 a.m. they carried 6¢. A promoted champion who does nothing until New Year's Eve pays Gane and nobody else, so those 35¢ are the market's price on something else happening in the 108 days left: a title fight before December 31 that Gane loses, or a vacant-title fight that he is not in. Add up the bids across all 12 contracts and the board now offers exactly 100¢ for a belt that will pay 100¢ to somebody, or to the Vacant contract. The same sum was 82¢ at 2 a.m., 71¢ on September 10 and 103¢ on August 28. The asks sum to 125¢. Last week we said the cents the bids did not cover were either a vacancy view or an empty book. Tonight the book is full, and the vacancy has its own contract at a penny.

What was said, and when. Four sourced statements now sit on the record since September 8, and the fourth ended the argument the first three started.

The first three are the ones the last two editions were built on. On Tuesday, September 8, Dana White said "Tom Aspinall is hurt, y'know, until we hear differently. So... the heavyweight division will just keep rolling," and Aspinall's bid went from 66¢ to an empty book. On Saturday, September 12, asked whether Aspinall should give up the belt the way Valentina Shevchenko had a week earlier, White answered: "We'll definitely be talking about that. Valentina doesn't want to tie up the division, and I'm assuming Tom feels the same way. I don't know personally where he is health-wise with everything, but we should clear that up soon." On Sunday, Henry Cejudo said on his podcast that Aspinall "needs to vacate or be stripped at this point."

The fourth came from Aspinall, on Instagram, early Monday. CBS Sports, Al Jazeera and Uncrowned carry the statement. The parts that matter to this board, in his words: "Ongoing complications with my eyes mean I cannot get medically cleared to fight right now. I've had multiple surgeries, accidents and infections, and done everything possible to get back to competing." Then the sentence that answers the question the whole of last week's edition was about: "I had previously agreed to a fight date and was back sparring, feeling great and ready to compete when an accident caused further damage to my right eye. This means more time away from the sport, and right now, the timing of my return is unclear." Then the decision: "I've now made the decision to vacate the heavyweight title. I've asked the UFC to allow me to make this statement because I don't want to hold the heavyweight division up. I know what it's like to have your career put on hold and I want the other fighters to have the opportunity to compete for the title." And the line every headline used: "I'm absolutely gutted. I've chased this dream since I was 10 years old. I'm not done." He also wrote that "many of the complications I'm dealing with are a result of fouls," and that "fighters rely on officials to enforce the rules." He did not retire.

Read those four against the calendar of the last three editions. On September 8 the UFC president said the champion was hurt; on September 12 he said the belt was a conversation the UFC would have; on September 14 the champion said he had agreed to a fight date, had been back sparring, and had been hurt again. Nothing sourced says when that accident happened or when the fight date was. What the statement does settle is the thing the market spent a week arguing about with itself: he was not stripped, he vacated, and he asked to be the one to say so.

The tape then reads like this, all times Eastern. The times follow the individual trade prints. Where we say "sold" or "bought" we mean the side that crossed the spread to make the trade happen.

• Monday, September 14, 4:03 a.m.: the first trades of the day. The time of the Instagram post is not on the record; the earliest report in our record, MMA Weekly's, is stamped 5:06 a.m. Eastern, an hour after this print. Fifteen Aspinall contracts sold at the 42¢ bid, then 28 at 6¢ and three at 7¢ in the same second: the bids underneath the top of the book were gone. At 4:04 a.m., 100 contracts sold at 15¢; at 4:05 a.m., 99 at 11¢.
• 4:05 a.m.: the first Gane buyer, 117 contracts taken between 44¢ and 46¢. By 4:23 a.m. buyers were paying 64¢ to 70¢; at 4:35 a.m., 143 contracts at 75¢.
• 4:21 a.m. to 4:39 a.m.: the penny contracts get bought. 468 Volkov at 1¢; about 2,600 Pereira between 2¢ and 5¢ at 4:29 a.m., 1,000 more at 5¢ at 4:39 a.m.; 1,000 Hokit between 7¢ and 12¢ at 4:38 a.m., about 850 of them at 12¢.
• 5:33 a.m. and 5:43 a.m.: 935 and 1,005 Volkov contracts bought at a penny.
• 7:46 a.m.: 829 Aspinall contracts sold at 2¢, the largest single sale of the day on his contract. The 7 a.m. hour took 1,377 of his contracts out at 2¢ to 7¢.
• 8:01 a.m.: 5,440 Volkov contracts bought at a penny in one burst, the biggest of them 2,479. At 8:05 a.m., 11,272 Pavlovich contracts bought at a penny, the biggest of them 3,800.
• 8:56 a.m.: the high on Gane, matched in size. 85¢ had first printed at 6:09 a.m. on 16 contracts; now 1,000 contracts were bought at 76¢ and 562 at 85¢ in the same second, with 80 more at 84¢. That 85¢ is the highest trade on any contract on this board since the page was written.
• 9:30 a.m.: 296 Gane contracts sold at 72¢. The 9 a.m. hour was all sellers on his contract, 436 contracts at 48¢ to 80¢. CBS Sports' report on the statement was up at 9:37 a.m.
• 11:22 a.m.: 2,015 Pereira contracts sold at 2¢, with about 600 more between 3¢ and 8¢. At 11:16 a.m. and 11:27 a.m., the first sustained Volkov buying above a dime: about 145 contracts at 17¢ to 21¢, on a contract whose last penny print was at 9:30 a.m.
• 12:56 p.m.: 946 Hokit contracts sold at 12¢, 917 of them in one print. At 1:01 p.m. Kalshi created the Vacant contract; it opened for trading at 5 p.m.
• 1:51 p.m.: 2,015 Pereira contracts bought at 3¢, the same count that was sold at 2¢ two and a half hours earlier. We can see the size, not the trader.
• 2:38 p.m.: 82 Gane contracts sold at 65¢ and 23 contracts filled at 39¢ and a handful at 34¢, the only prints under 44¢ on his contract all day. At 3:21 p.m., 470 Jon Jones contracts were bought at 16¢, on a contract that had no bid; nothing sourced was reported about Jones on Monday, and his quote went straight back to 0¢ bid.
• 5:05 p.m.: the biggest buy of the day on Gane's contract: 1,803 contracts at 73¢ and 1,000 at 70¢ in the same second, 2,933 contracts in the 5 p.m. hour, nearly all of it that one order. Five minutes earlier the Vacant contract had opened, and every one of its 20 trades by this read, 91 contracts, was a seller crossing the spread, at 1¢ and 2¢. At 5:09 p.m., 1,430 Volkov contracts were sold at 11¢ to 16¢, 1,000 of them at 11¢.
• 6:35 p.m.: 539 Hokit contracts bought at 14¢. At 8:27 p.m., the time of this read, the quotes were Gane 64¢ bid and 67¢ ask, Volkov 14¢ and 19¢, Hokit 12¢ and 16¢, Pereira 9¢ and 11¢, Vacant 1¢ and 2¢, and Aspinall 0¢ and 1¢.

The 24-hour volume at this read, in contracts, went Pavlovich 12,230, Pereira 10,896, Volkov 9,827, Gane 6,937, Hokit 4,308, Aspinall 3,622, Jones 538, Vacant 91. The three biggest numbers on that list belong to contracts that were penny contracts at 2 a.m. Pavlovich and Volkov were bought by the thousand at a penny in the four hours after the first trade; Pereira's day was bought early, sold at 11:22 a.m. and bought back at 1:51 p.m. Two of the three, Pavlovich and Pereira, are still quoted with an ask of 11¢ or less. The Pavlovich buying has no report behind it: 11,272 contracts at a penny at 8:05 a.m., nothing on Monday connecting him to the title, and a quote of 0¢ bid and 4¢ ask tonight. What the tape does show is that the Volkov burst three minutes earlier, at 8:01 a.m., was filled in many of the same sizes: 52, 118, 263, 400, 400, 500, 600 and 600 contracts appear in both. That is what one sweep of the penny asks across two contracts looks like. We can see the sizes, not the trader.

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 on the Gane market reads, with his name in the slot: "If Ciryl Gane 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 an interim 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 Monday made this board the clearest example of it we have.

Here is the sentence that decides Gane's 64¢. Under the second provision, he "is only an interim champion when an undisputed champion exists." Since Monday morning, none does. Whether that alone makes his interim belt count, or whether the UFC has to formally promote him before his contract can settle Yes, is a question the terms do not answer in so many words, and the exchange has not said. The market has already answered it one way: 64¢ on a fighter whose promotion no one at the UFC has announced is a bet that the announcement is a formality. Every report on the record reads it the same way. CBS Sports' division roundup, published at 12:51 p.m. Monday, calls promotion "the obvious next step," and none of the outlets we read on Monday reported a UFC statement on it. The closest precedent is June 2025, when Jon Jones retired and interim champion Aspinall was promoted the same week. That is the precedent the 64¢ is built on.

The third provision is the one that changed on Monday. When this page was written, Kalshi listed 11 contracts on this event and no "Vacant" contract, and we wrote that if the belt went vacant and nobody won it by noon on December 31, every contract on the board would resolve No and nobody would be paid. At 1:01 p.m. on Monday, Kalshi created a twelfth contract, "Vacant," whose rule reads: "If no competitor is the UFC Heavyweight Title Holder on Dec 31, 2026 at 12:00 PM ET, then the market resolves to Yes." It opened at 5 p.m., traded 91 contracts by this read, every one of them a sale, and sits at 1¢ bid and 2¢ ask. The scenario the panel modeled as "Nobody On This Board" at 5% now has a price, and the price is a penny. The reason it is a penny, and not the 18¢ the bids left uncovered at 2 a.m., is the same precedent: a belt with an interim champion under it does not stay vacant, it gets handed over. Shevchenko's belt went vacant because there was nobody to hand it to. This one has Gane.

Two consequences follow, and they run in opposite directions for him.

The first is that a promotion, if it comes, makes Gane's path the passive one that used to be Aspinall's. A champion who is not booked before December 31 pays his contract by doing nothing. The second is that a promoted champion at heavyweight, with two numbered cards left that have no heavyweight bout on them, two contenders publicly calling for him, and a number-two contender CBS Sports calls the most deserving, is also the only man on the board who can lose this market in a cage before it settles. The 35¢ of bid sitting under Volkov, Hokit and Pereira is the price of that second consequence.

Tom Aspinall's Contract Is Done

Aspinall's path to a Yes was the only passive one on the board for 17 days, and on Monday morning he gave it up himself. His contract has no bid tonight and a 1¢ ask. He is not champion, he cannot be medically cleared, and there is no route back to the belt by December 31 that his own statement leaves open: "the timing of my return is unclear."

The record on his health is worth keeping here, because it is the record the market spent a week mispricing in both directions. Aspinall was diagnosed with bilateral traumatic Brown's syndrome after the eye pokes at UFC 321 and, by his own count on Monday, has had "multiple surgeries, accidents and infections" since. Per Forbes on August 26, he had been medically cleared in July and was in discussions with the UFC about a return. Eddie Hearn, who represents him, told The Ariel Helwani Show on September 2 that the question was "whether he's medically ready to fight and what the commission or the medicals would say." White called him hurt "until we hear differently" on September 8. Aspinall's own statement on Monday fills in what none of them had said: he "had previously agreed to a fight date," was "back sparring," and then "an accident caused further damage to my right eye." The market bought his contract to 70¢ on Saturday evening, September 12, on no sourced news; whether the new injury had already happened by then is not on the record, and we are not going to place it.

There is a documented dispute underneath all of this, and Monday's statement returned to it. Aspinall accused Gane of deliberate fouling after UFC 321, 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 it, 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 apologized for the poke on the night; the foul was treated as accidental, the bout was ruled a no contest, and Aspinall kept the belt. On Monday Aspinall wrote that "many of the complications I'm dealing with are a result of fouls" and that "fighters rely on officials to enforce the rules." He did not name Gane in that line. There was also a money dispute on the record: Hearn told ESPN in June that he did not want Aspinall to fight under his current UFC contract, and Forbes reported in August that Hearn had offered to buy that contract out. Aspinall's statement thanks the UFC for its support and says the promotion was informed throughout; nothing sourced says the contract question was part of Monday's decision.

We are not adjudicating any of that. What matters for a price is that the man whose contract this page was built around has left the market by his own hand, that his exit was medical by his own account, and that the belt he gave up now belongs, on paper, to nobody.

Ciryl Gane Is 64¢ On A Promotion Nobody Has Announced

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, the UFC ranks him the number-one heavyweight contender, and he has come up short in three previous bids for the undisputed belt: to Francis Ngannou in 2022, to Jon Jones in 2023, and the no contest against Aspinall.

His contract used to need one of two things: beat Aspinall before December 31, or have Aspinall vacate and be promoted. The first door closed on Monday and the second opened. Since the UFC has not spoken, the 64¢ is priced on two things happening in order: the promotion, which every outlet expects and none has confirmed, and then no loss of the belt before noon on December 31. The first is the formality. The second is the calendar.

The UFC's published calendar between this read and settlement runs: 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, with Fight Nights on September 26, October 10, October 17, October 31, November 7 and November 21. December Fight Nights have not been announced.

UFC 331, 332 and 333 already have bouts booked, including their title fights: flyweight on 331, a vacant women's flyweight title on 332, featherweight and bantamweight on 333. The heavyweight bouts booked across those three cards are Gable Steveson against Sean Sharaf and Tai Tuivasa against Robelis Despaigne on 331, Johnny Walker against Mick Parkin and Anthony Wint against Lucas Armand on 332, and Alexander Volkov against Rizvan Kuniev on 333, the last of which was reported in August as an apparent title eliminator with the winner in line for a shot in 2027. Not one is for a belt.

That leaves UFC 334 and UFC 335. UFC 334, which the UFC has branded Polymarket UFC 334 after its title sponsor, is 61 days away and 47 days clear of settlement; as of this read it has two bouts announced, a lightweight fight between Nazim Sadykhov and Jefferson Nascimento and a flyweight fight between Luis Gurule and Bilal Hasan, and no main event. 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 and has one bout booked, a middleweight title fight between Sean Strickland and Nassourdine Imavov, which is a headliner but not a heavyweight one. Those two mostly empty cards are the entire realistic window in which a promoted Gane could be made to defend before this contract settles. The six announced Fight Nights are not in that window: an undisputed heavyweight title fight on a Fight Night rather than a numbered card would be out of character for the promotion.

Who would be in the cage with him is now the live argument, and the three names on the board with a real bid are the three names in it. Alex Pereira has been calling for the rematch since September 7, and on Monday Chris Weidman made the case for him in the terms a matchmaker would: "Pereira is the biggest star, he's still the biggest star ... if we're going off 'rightful' he probably shouldn't get the opportunity but I think he's probably the frontrunner to get the rematch." Josh Hokit posted on X on Monday: "The fans deserve Me vs Gane. I'll give Ciryl what he has coming. If Alex can win 1 fight in my weight class, I'll give it to him too, early '27. I'll be the most active champ in the company." And CBS Sports' roundup calls Volkov, the number-two contender, "the most deserving man for a heavyweight title shot," while noting he is booked against Kuniev on October 24. A title shot for Volkov before December 31 means either pulling him off that card or booking him for UFC 335 seven weeks after a fight; the market's 14¢ says it has not ruled either out. Pereira at 9¢ and Hokit at 12¢ are prices on one of those two cards, most loudly UFC 334 at Madison Square Garden, where Pereira has said he wants to fight. None of the three is booked for anything but Volkov's eliminator, and the UFC has not said whether the new champion, once it names him, fights this year at all.

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 anonymized reasoning and were allowed to revise. The panel column is the August 28 run, unchanged; the price column is September 14 at 8:27 p.m. Eastern. Kalshi's Vacant contract, created Monday, is shown against the panel's nobody-on-this-board bucket, which is the outcome it pays on.

Outcome	Rank (Sept. 8 UFC rankings)	Market price, Sept. 14 (what buyers bid / what sellers ask)	Panel, Aug. 28
Ciryl Gane	No. 1 (interim champ)	64¢ / 67¢	25.5%
Alexander Volkov	No. 2	14¢ / 19¢	2.0%
Josh Hokit	No. 4	12¢ / 16¢	1.0%
Alex Pereira	Unranked at heavyweight	9¢ / 11¢	0.35%
Vacant (nobody on this board)	Contract created Sept. 14	1¢ / 2¢	5.0%
Sergei Pavlovich	No. 3	0¢ / 4¢	1.0%
Tom Aspinall	Vacated Sept. 14	0¢ / 1¢	63.0%
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	Unranked (dropped from No. 15)	0¢ / 1¢	0.1%

A note on that price column. Five of the 12 contracts have a real quote with a bid behind it tonight: Gane, Volkov, Hokit, Pereira and Vacant. At 2 a.m. it was four, and one of the four was Aspinall. The other seven sit at zero bid; Pavlovich's 4¢ ask is the only one of them wider than two cents, which is what 11,272 contracts bought at a penny does to a book nobody is selling into. Tonight the bids sum to 100¢ exactly and the asks to 125¢, and the vacancy has its own contract at a penny. The panel column does not add to 100 either: it is a median of the seats rather than an average; the 11 fighters sum to about 94%, and with the 5% bucket to about 99%. Its 63% on Aspinall will grade as a miss when the market settles, and we say so below.

More live boards from the same panel: UFC lightweight title odds, Justin Gaethje 89¢ · UFC welterweight title odds, Islam Makhachev 91¢ · Makhachev vs. Machado Garry market guide. Prices fetched September 14, 2026.

Here is every seat's number on the two contracts that carried the board on August 28, as generated that day.

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%

The panel's seats are graded against real market settlements — records as of the August 28 run, for the six seats that had a published record at that time: 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 agreed almost exactly on Aspinall when the page was written, at 63% and 61.5¢. Both were wrong, and the market found out first. The seats put 63% on a champion staying champion by doing nothing, and the thing that beat them was not a booking, a strip or a buyout, the three risks this page listed on August 28; it was a new eye injury nobody on the record knew about until the champion described it. That will grade as a miss on the biggest contract on the board when the market settles, and it will be recorded as one. The market's own path to the same answer took 17 days and ran through a 70¢ print on Saturday evening; it was not sharper, it was just faster on Monday.

Where the seats were right is the part that matters for the 108 days left. Gemini and Grok both argued, in the revision round, that if Aspinall went, the belt would route to Gane by promotion rather than to nobody, and Grok moved three points out of the vacancy bucket to say so. Claude Fable refused that on a distinction, that "the 2025 promotion followed a voluntary retirement, not a contract dispute," and kept 10% on nobody. Monday split the difference in a way none of them quite priced: the exit was voluntary and medical at once, and the vacancy contract Kalshi created for it is quoted at a penny. The seats gave Gane 25.5% in a world where he needed to beat Aspinall or inherit the belt; the market's 64¢ tonight is the inheritance priced as nearly certain, discounted by the chance he has to defend it before New Year's Eve.

Josh Hokit, Alexander Volkov, And The Contracts That Woke Up

The most interesting contracts on this board on August 28 were the ones with a bid and no path. Tonight three of them have a path, and it is the same one: a promoted champion, an empty Madison Square Garden card 61 days out, and a promotion that likes a headliner.

Josh Hokit is 10-0 as a professional and ranked fourth at heavyweight, 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. More contracts are open on him than on any name but Pereira: about 28,400 against roughly 41,600 in lifetime volume, contract counts rather than dollars. He was bought to 12¢ at 4:38 a.m. Monday, 35 minutes after the day's first trade, sold back to 12¢ in a 946-contract pass at 12:56 p.m., and bought again at 14¢ in the evening; his quote is 12¢ bid and 16¢ ask, a 7¢ gain on the day. His Monday post asks for Gane by name and offers Pereira a shot "early '27" if he "can win 1 fight in my weight class." That post is the whole of his case for this year: nothing is booked for him, and the panel's 1.0% in August was built on exactly that absence.

Alexander Volkov is the contract nobody had bid on until Monday. He is the number-two contender, and he has a fight: Kuniev, October 24, UFC 333, reported as an eliminator for a 2027 shot. His contract traded at a penny for the whole life of this page, and on Monday it was bought by the thousand at a penny between 4:21 a.m. and 8:01 a.m., 7,850 contracts in four bursts, before the first sustained buying above a dime arrived just after 11:15 a.m. By the afternoon it was trading between 14¢ and 21¢; at 5:09 p.m., 1,430 contracts were sold into it, and it sits at 14¢ bid and 19¢ ask. The price is a bet that the UFC skips the eliminator and books the number-two contender straight into a title fight before December 31, or that he wins on October 24 and gets the December card. His last fight with Gane, at UFC 310 in December 2024, went to Gane by split decision, and CBS Sports notes that 19 of 20 media scorecards had it for Volkov. The panel gave him 2.0% on August 28, the highest number it gave anyone outside the top two, and for the first time the market has him where the panel did: first among the names behind the favorite, now second only to Gane.

Alex Pereira's contract has traded roughly 112,800 lifetime, more than double any other name here, with about 45,700 contracts still open. It went from 1¢ bid to 9¢ bid on Monday, and the tape on it is the strangest on the board: about 3,600 contracts bought between 2¢ and 5¢ by 4:39 a.m. and 1,000 more up to 12¢ a minute later, 2,015 sold at 2¢ at 11:22 a.m., and 2,015 bought at 3¢ at 1:51 p.m. He 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. His case is not a ranking. It is that he is, in Weidman's words, "still the biggest star," that he has been asking for the rematch for a week, and that UFC 334 in New York has no main event. Jon Jones, who has not fought since November 2024 and vacated this belt on retirement in June 2025, still has about 20,000 contracts open, took a 470-contract buy at 16¢ at 3:21 p.m. on no sourced news, and has no bid tonight. That one is what a famous name looks like on the afternoon the belt comes open.

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. Read it now knowing how it came out.

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:

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

Sonnet's line is the one to keep. The fact that decided this board was a "different medical detail," an accident that damaged the eye again, and it was outside the data card because it was outside everyone's knowledge until Monday. Gemini's revision, Aspinall up and Gane down, moved the wrong way on both, even though its reasoning named the promotion path. Grok's reallocation into Gane on the precedent is the single best call any seat made on this board, and it was three percentage points. Fable's distinction was correct as a distinction, and Monday turned out to be neither a retirement nor a contract dispute; it was a voluntary vacate for a medical reason, and the market has priced the belt going to Gane as though that were the Jones case all over again. Whether it is comes down to a UFC announcement that had not arrived by the time of this read.

What Would Change The Panel's Mind

The list this page has carried since August 28 had four items. The second of them, "UFC stripping Aspinall, or Aspinall vacating," happened on Monday. Here is the list as it stands now, each item checkable, with the direction it pushes the number.

• The UFC Formally Promoting Gane To Undisputed Champion. Expected by every outlet, confirmed by none as of this read. It turns the 64¢ from an inference into the passive path. Pushes Gane up, Vacant to zero.
• A Vacant-Title Fight Instead Of A Promotion. The other way the UFC could go, and the one no report expects. It would put Gane in a cage for the belt rather than hand it to him. Pushes Gane down hard, and pushes whoever is across from him up.
• A Gane Defense Booked For UFC 334 Or UFC 335. The only way a promoted champion loses this market. Pereira, Hokit and Volkov are the names in the argument, and the one who gets the booking becomes the second-biggest contract on the board the day it is announced. Pushes Gane down, that one contender up, the other two toward zero.
• UFC 334 Announcing A Different Headliner. Madison Square Garden needs a main event, and if it goes to another division the window for a heavyweight title fight this year narrows to UFC 335 alone. Pushes Gane up.

The Dates That Decide It

Date	What happens
September 14, 2026	Tom Aspinall vacates the undisputed title. Kalshi lists a "Vacant" contract the same afternoon.
September 19, October 3, October 24, 2026	UFC 331, 332 and 333. Cards already built; five heavyweight bouts across them, none for a belt. Volkov vs. Kuniev on October 24.
November 14, 2026	UFC 334, Madison Square Garden. Two bouts announced, no main event. 47 days before settlement.
December 12, 2026	UFC 335, T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas. One bout booked, a middleweight title fight; no heavyweight bout. 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 promotion announcement or a booking is exactly the kind of move that triggers it. The prices and calendar above are as of September 14, 2026, 8:27 p.m. Eastern; the panel verdicts are as of August 28.

The Bottom Line

The next thing that moves this board is a UFC announcement, and it can only go two ways: Gane is promoted, or the belt is put up for a fight. Everything on the record points to the first. If it comes, the champion's contract is priced the way Aspinall's was on August 28, on a calendar rather than a fight, and the only question left for the 108 days is whether the promotion books the new champion into Madison Square Garden or Las Vegas before New Year's Eve and against whom.

Aspinall wrote that he did not want to hold the division up. The market took him at his word before the earliest report in our record: the first sale printed at 4:03 a.m., the first Gane buyer at 4:05 a.m., and the first report in our record is stamped 5:06 a.m. What it has not taken on faith is the rest of the year. Thirty-five cents of bid sits under three men who are not champion and are not booked, and that is the board's running answer to the sentence buried in the contract terms: an interim champion is not a champion until someone says so, and a champion at heavyweight with two empty cards in front of him is not safe until the calendar runs out.

Nothing here is a recommendation to take a position.

Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style; trading-floor photo composited from a public-domain image. The board in the illustration is from an earlier read and is illustrative only; the prices in this article are current as of September 14, 2026.

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