Kalshi is fighting allegations that it inflated volume in its new crypto perpetual futures, after a pseudonymous analyst flagged repeated identical trades and a volume-to-open-interest ratio he called a textbook sign of wash trading.
The dispute started over the weekend when Beni, co-founder of quant firm Stealth Neolab, posted on X that Kalshi’s ether perpetual contract logged $539 million in 24-hour trading volume against just $3.1 million of open interest. On most derivatives venues, volume running 174 times larger than open interest is a red flag: it suggests churn between accounts rather than genuine positioning. He also pointed to repeating trade sizes, with identical $5,500 fills printing over and over on both the bitcoin and ether books.
Kalshi’s crypto business head, who posts as IcoBeast.eth, answered in a thread on Sunday. He said the Artemis chart Beni cited shows prediction market share, not perpetual futures volume, and that Kalshi does not pay rebates on its crypto prediction markets. On the perps side, he argued the repeated sizes reflect market-maker liquidity programs, in which market makers are paid flat fees to keep orders of a prescribed size resting near the market, and other traders repeatedly take those orders when price moves in their favor.
He also pushed back on the claim that a single firm, SCM, is Kalshi’s designated market maker for perps. Under CFTC rules, he wrote, any qualified entity can become a self-clearing member, and fair access is a regulatory mandate, not a privilege Kalshi hands out.
“I’m the first to admit that it’s early days for perps for us given we’re building a new product in untrodden territory. But the core difference between Kalshi and offshore perp exchanges is that while other exchanges run deals in the dark, we need to file our incentive programs publicly and so what you see is truly what you get,” Kalshi’s crypto business head told CoinDesk.
Why the numbers look strange
Kalshi launched perpetual futures in May, the first US-regulated exchange to offer the product, and added crypto perps on more than a dozen tokens through the summer. The product is young, and young derivatives markets routinely show odd volume profiles. Market makers quoting both sides generate enormous turnover with almost no net exposure, which is exactly the pattern a low open-interest figure captures.
Whether that turnover should count as real volume is a fair question, and one regulators have asked about other venues for years. The wash-trading accusation carries more weight here than in most crypto squabbles because Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated designated contract market, and its incentive schemes are filed publicly with the agency. Anyone who thinks the fees reward fake flow can read the filings.
The timing is awkward for the company. Kalshi just crossed $40 billion in monthly volume for the second straight month, driven largely by sports event contracts, and it is fighting state regulators in several courts over sports markets. It filed rules for US stock perpetual futures last week and is seeking CFTC approval for margin trading on event contracts. A credibility fight over its newest product lands at a bad moment.
The company’s growth story makes the stakes concrete. Kalshi added 3 million users during the FIFA World Cup this summer, and its NFL Week 1 volume hit $733 million two weeks ago. The crypto perps business is a rounding error next to those numbers today, but it is the product line the company has bet its next chapter on. CEO Tarek Mansour called perps the exchange’s evolution from prediction market leader to next-generation derivatives exchange when the product launched.
What critics are still asking
Beni’s core complaint stands regardless of the market-maker explanation: the volume number, as reported, does not describe economic activity in the contract. If a market maker turns over the same $5,500 order hundreds of times a day for a flat fee, the printed volume measures incentive-program throughput, not trader conviction. Some analysts suggested Kalshi should break out market-maker flow from directional flow in its public data, the way some crypto venues report taker versus maker volume.
There is also the question of who is on the other side. For churn to reach $539 million in a day, someone must keep taking the resting orders. Beni implied the taker was the market maker itself or an affiliated account; Kalshi has not named the participants and says its filings show who gets paid and why.
The context matters too. Offshore perpetual venues did $28 trillion in annual volume in 2023 and more than $90 trillion in 2025, by Kalshi’s own figures, making perps one of the fastest-growing derivative products ever. US institutions have been locked out of that market entirely. If regulated perps take even a small share of that flow, the reporting standards set now will apply to a very large business later.
The exchange has not said whether it will change how it reports perp volume. Its US perp product competes with offshore venues, and clean reporting is one of the few structural advantages a regulated venue can claim. Trading volume on the ether contract eased in the days after the dispute, and attention has shifted to whether the CFTC weighs in. The agency has not commented.
For now, the dispute is a data-labeling argument more than a scandal. Nobody alleges customer funds are missing or that prices were manipulated. The question is whether a headline volume number on a regulated US exchange means what readers assume it means. That question will follow every new US perps venue, and Kalshi is simply the first to run into it.