Kalshi Rejects Wash-Trading Claims After Analyst Flags Repeated $5,500 Ether Perp Trades

Kalshi is disputing allegations that trading volume in its crypto perpetual futures is inflated by handpicked market makers, or self-clearing members, after an analyst published data showing that a single repeated order size accounted for most of the activity in the exchange’s ether contract.

The analyst, a co-founder of research firm Stealth Neolab who posts on X as Beni, wrote in a Sept. 20 thread that Kalshi’s ether perpetual logged roughly $539 million in 24-hour volume against about $3.1 million in open interest, turnover of roughly 174 times. Open interest measures the value of positions still held; volume measures what changed hands. A gap that wide is a conventional red flag for wash trading. In a follow-up, he said trades of exactly $5,500 made up 48% to 58% of all ether perp notional volume on four days between Sept. 16 and Sept. 20, and that the largest position on Kalshi’s public leaderboard read $17,598 when he captured it. He said anyone can pull the same data from Kalshi’s public API.

Beni alleged that market makers selected by Kalshi were behind the purported wash trading, citing a CFTC filing extending a program under which eligible makers receive 0.3 basis points and takers pay 0.3 basis points, netting to zero. That filing excludes suspected wash trades, self-matching and pre-arranged trades from rewards. He also cited a February Bloomberg report that Jump Trading would take a fixed equity stake in Kalshi in exchange for providing liquidity. Kalshi launched crypto perps on June 3 after the CFTC approved its BTCPERP contract on May 29, and the products cleared $5.5 billion of volume in their first two weeks.

IcoBeast.eth, who works on Kalshi’s crypto products, rejected the allegations in a public reply. He said the Artemis chart that started the argument measured prediction-market share, not perpetuals volume. He said Kalshi counts volume the way Polymarket does, as the maximum payout of contracts traded rather than cash spent, because each contract settles at $1.

He also said any firm meeting CFTC requirements can become a self-clearing member, that fair access is a regulatory obligation, and that Kalshi runs no rebate program on crypto prediction contracts. Rebates are standard at CME Group, Hyperliquid and Binance, he argued, and Kalshi’s must be filed publicly while other exchanges run deals in the dark.

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