$5 Billion of Nearly Identical Kalshi Trades Draw CFTC Scrutiny

One Order Size Marks a Majority of the Volume

Traders on Kalshi have made almost one million trades of nearly identical size in a single market since August, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. In recent weeks, more than one-third of trades in the market on the price of ether consisted of rapid orders clustering at about $5,500. The Journal put the pattern at more than $5 billion in volume over the past month, and said the CFTC is reviewing the activity before deciding whether to open an enforcement investigation.

However, the pattern is still running, as shown by pulling every trade in Kalshi’s ether perpetual from the exchange’s public margin API shows (the interface previously revealed a demo environment for leveraged trading in May). Accessing the API requires no account.

Pulling every trade in the market from Kalshi’s public margin API for the 24 hours to 12:17 UTC on Wednesday shows 136,474 trades worth about $584 million. Over 73,200 of them—54% of trades and 68% of the value—fell in a narrow band around $5,426. Open interest stood at $6.6 million, so the market turned over roughly 88 times its open positions in a day. The contract counts inside the cluster shift—1,971, 1,972, 1,975—while the dollar size holds, which is what a resting order of fixed value looks like as ether moves.

That does not by itself show anything improper, and Kalshi described it as normal trading behavior. The company told the Journal that hundreds of distinct traders were involved, and that the repeated sizes come from market makers holding fixed resting orders that faster traders hit.

Kalshi further said that self-trading is mechanically blocked, coordinated wash trading is prohibited and monitored, and its liquidity programs pay for orders held at set sizes and spreads rather than for volume. Jump Trading and Wintermute were among the firms involved in the rapid trades, the Journal reported; Jump said it trades for profit, uses self-match prevention and does not coordinate with other traders.

In a Tuesday post, Kalshi described accusations of embellished crypto perps volume as “misleading in some cases, and false in others.”

Kalshi Faces Allegations

The allegations initially originated from an analyst on X. Beni, a co-founder of research firm Stealth Neolab, wrote on Sept. 19 that the ether perpetual had logged $539 million of 24-hour volume against $3.1 million of open interest, and that trades of exactly $5,500 made up 48% to 58% of notional volume on four days. Kalshi’s crypto lead, who posts as IcoBeast, replied that the critic had confused prediction-market data with perpetuals and that rebate programs are standard at CME Group, Hyperliquid and Binance.

Kalshi certified a filing with the CFTC on Sept. 16 extending a temporary rebate program on perpetual taker fees for self-clearing members. The filing excludes fees paid on trades that result from or are under investigation for self-matching, wash trading or pre-arranged trading. CFTC staff warned in August that steep volume-based rewards can push participants to trade purely to hit targets, per BeInCrypto.

Kalshi launched crypto perpetuals on June 3, after the CFTC approved its bitcoin contract on May 29, and cleared $5.5 billion in the first two weeks. No enforcement action has been announced as of the time of writing this article.