preferred on
Points of Focus
- Nearly 1 million nearly identical trades have moved through Kalshi’s ETH market since August.
- Kalshi says the CFTC has not contacted it; the Journal says a review is underway.
- Kalshi’s rebuttal corrects an earlier, widely cited but inactive fee filing.
Nearly 1 million trades of almost identical size have moved through Kalshi’s Ethereum perpetual market since August, totaling more than $5 billion. The Wall Street Journal said the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is reviewing it. Kalshi said it has not been contacted and points to a market maker doing exactly what it was paid to do.
THREAD : full review of Kalshi's volume fraud evidences
Over the past few days Kalshi has been revealed to fraud their volume numbers.
The evidences are scattered across multiple posts by @beniduboss, @danielsapkota and myself and keep piling up at a rapid pace
To keep track… pic.twitter.com/6r3hT2Qj47
— Quant Chad (@Autonomous_Chad) September 21, 2026
Kalshi’s Ethereum perpetual futures market has spent five days at the center of a dispute over what its trading volume actually represents. What started as one analyst’s thread on Sept. 19 grew into a Wall Street Journal investigation, a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) review, and a detailed public rebuttal from Kalshi, with the underlying trading pattern still running as of Wednesday morning.
The pattern itself is not in dispute. What it means remains unresolved.
Kalshi’s $5,500 trade pattern and how large it has actually grown
Beni, a quantitative analyst and co-founder of research firm Stealth Neolab, opened the dispute on Sept. 19, posting that Kalshi’s ETH-PERP contract had logged roughly $538.6 million in 24-hour volume against about $3.1 million in open interest, a turnover ratio near 174 times.
This thread is 100% gonna blow up and I am gonna look like a salty c****again but @icobeast pissed me off so now it's gonna get ugly
Kalshi fakes their crypto volume and I can prove it
NOTHING pisses me off more than watching a company treat its own customers like complete… https://t.co/1LWMVGVaeU
— Beni (@beniduboss) September 19, 2026
“FYI, that means an amount equal to the ENTIRE outstanding ETH position base changes hands 174x every 24h,” Beni wrote. He followed with a more specific claim: Trades sized at exactly $5,500 accounted for 48%-58% of ETH perpetual notional volume across four separate days.
The Wall Street Journal’s investigation, published Sept. 23, found the pattern was both larger and longer-running than Beni’s initial post suggested. Nearly 1 million trades of near-identical size have moved through the ETH-PERP market since August, the WSJ reported, totaling more than $5 billion in volume over the past month, with over a third of recent trades clustering around $5,500.
The pattern had not stopped by the time of the WSJ’s reporting: Trades near $5,425 accounted for roughly 70% of the market’s notional volume in the 24 hours to 08:13 UTC on Sept. 24, a higher concentration than any figure cited earlier in the week.
SCOOP with @ByKLong @ceostroff:
– The CFTC is examining unusual Kalshi trades with near-identical sizes that now total over $5B
– Prop-trading firms Jump Trading (a Kalshi shareholder) and Wintermute were two of the parties involved in the transactionsWe analyzed months of… pic.twitter.com/y45w5ps98h
— Neil Mehta (@byneilmehta) September 22, 2026
A public GitHub repository published by a user identified as “nalimmm” independently reproduced Beni’s earlier findings using Kalshi’s public, unauthenticated trade API. Because a trader targeting a fixed dollar amount prints a slightly different exact integer as the spot price drifts, the repository bands trades within a narrow range around $5,500 rather than matching an exact figure, a methodology that shows the size accounted for 43.5%, 58.4%, 51.4%, and 47.6% of notional volume across four analyzed windows.
The repository’s author is explicit about the limits of this method: “This is a descriptive/statistical tool, not a verdict. A high concentration on one clip size, even with a high burst rate, is not proof of wash trading by itself. It can also arise from legitimate algorithmic market-making with a fixed dollar target.”
The concentration is not unique to Ether (ETH). The same GitHub analysis found Bitcoin (BTC) perpetual trades clustering around two sizes, near $2,500 and near $5,000, together accounting for 35.1% of one sampled window, a real concentration but structurally different from ETH’s single dominant size.
Kalshi’s detailed rebuttal and the error in how this got reported
Kalshi published its point-by-point response on Sept. 22, titled “The Facts Behind Kalshi’s Perpetuals Volume,” and it corrects a detail that circulated widely in coverage of this dispute.
A separate CFTC filing describing a 0.3-basis-point taker rebate offset by a 0.3-basis-point maker payment, which is cited as the incentive structure behind the pattern, is not live. Kalshi stated, “This program is not live, and in any case would require a public exchange notice were it to take effect.” The actual operative program, initiated in July, is a temporary fee holiday: Self-Clearing Members receive a monthly rebate that exactly matches the trading fees they paid on perpetual futures that month, not a per-trade payment structure.
Kalshi’s rebuttal explains why that distinction matters with an illustrative example. A market maker earning a flat monthly fee for keeping resting bid and ask orders of a fixed size on the book, for example, uses $5,000 and has no incentive to trade with itself. But a faster, technologically superior trading company can profitably trade against that market maker’s resting quotes whenever the true price moves before the market maker updates its orders, and because that company pays no fees under the same fee holiday, even a small, repeated edge is worth capturing.
Kalshi’s analysis of the data found the aggressor side was profitable, not wash-neutral. If one company had been trading against the resting maker at the volumes shown, Kalshi calculated, that company would have earned a profit near $98,000, which the company argues is evidence of genuine directional risk-taking rather than manufactured, costless volume. In this reading, the fixed trade size reflects the maker’s chosen resting order size, not coordination between the two sides.
Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana addressed the regulatory question head-on, telling reporters, “We have not been contacted by the CFTC and don’t believe there is any formal examination,” adding, “As we’ve said, these data patterns are typical of liquidity incentive programs and common in financial markets.”
Jump Trading, one of the companies The WSJ identified as active in the rapid trades, said it trades for its profit, uses self-match prevention, and does not coordinate with other traders.
The CFTC’s actual involvement and the broader regulatory backdrop
The CFTC has not opened a formal investigation or accused Kalshi of misconduct. Per The WSJ, the agency is reviewing the trading pattern before deciding whether to escalate, a different status than an active enforcement matter, and one Kalshi disputes even applies to it given the company’s account that no contact has occurred.
This is not Kalshi’s only active regulatory front. New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi in July, seeking to block its event contracts in the state and recover more than $36 billion. The CFTC used emergency authority on Aug. 11 to order Kalshi to keep operating under federal rules while that fight continues, with CFTC Chair Michael Selig arguing federal law governs interstate derivatives markets.
The Ethereum perpetual review is a separate matter from that dispute. Still, it lands on a company already under active regulatory and legal scrutiny on multiple fronts, which shapes how seriously any new pattern is read even before its merits are settled.
Kalshi has also demonstrated willingness to police its users in unrelated cases: It handed former Congressman George Santos a lifetime ban and a $71,356 penalty in late August for trading on whether he would attend the State of the Union and separately banned three political candidates for five years each for trading on their own races.
What Kalshi’s wash-trading dispute actually turns on
Kalshi’s rebuttal accepts the mechanism driving the pattern. A subsidized market maker keeps quoting a fixed size. Faster traders repeatedly capture the edge on those quotes. That dynamic argues against calling it wash trading in any meaningful sense since one side consistently profits while the other consistently does not. A costless, self-dealing wash trade would show the opposite pattern, with no side systematically winning or losing. That argument is coherent on its own terms and consistent with the GitHub analysis’ profitability data.
SCOOP with @ByKLong @ceostroff:
– The CFTC is examining unusual Kalshi trades with near-identical sizes that now total over $5B
– Prop-trading firms Jump Trading (a Kalshi shareholder) and Wintermute were two of the parties involved in the transactionsWe analyzed months of… pic.twitter.com/y45w5ps98h
— Neil Mehta (@byneilmehta) September 22, 2026
What it does not resolve is whether the maker and the aggressor are actually independent counterparties. Kalshi’s public trade data, like most exchange feeds, does not identify which accounts sit on either side of a trade, so neither Beni’s original allegation nor Kalshi’s rebuttal can settle that question from public information alone.
IcoBeast, Kalshi’s crypto product lead, softened his own posture on Sept. 22 after an initially combative exchange with Beni, writing, “I thought more about it. beni, sorry […] i shouldn’t have attacked you personally […] i do want to clarify one thing: our incentives pay for liquidity, not wash trading.”
What is confirmed and unproven about Kalshi’s trading pattern
What can be stated with confidence: The clustering pattern is real, has run since August, exceeds $5 billion in volume, and has been independently reproduced against Kalshi’s public trade data through methodologies that account for price drift. Kalshi’s account of the mechanism, a subsidized maker and a faster aggressor, is internally consistent and supported by the profitability data both sides have now looked at.
What remains unproven is the one fact that would settle this: whether the maker and the aggressor are unrelated parties, a question Kalshi’s public data cannot answer and that only account-level information held by Kalshi and its regulator can resolve. Until the CFTC’s review concludes one way or another, the dispute stands there.
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