Nearly a million identically sized trades have passed through Kalshi's ether perpetual contract in about a month. The exchange says the pattern comes from market makers it pays to post liquidity and that it has not been contacted by the CFTC.
On at least one recent day, Kalshi's ether perpetual futures market traded about $539 million of contracts. The value of positions left open at the end of it was about $3.1 million.
That is a ratio of roughly 174 to 1. Every dollar of open positions changed hands about 174 times over 24 hours.
The figure comes from the same set of trading data that has drawn attention to the market in recent days. Over roughly a month, the contract has recorded nearly one million trades of exactly $5,500 each, adding up to more than $5 billion of volume. On four separate days in September, $5,500 trades made up 48% to 58% of daily notional volume.
Kalshi has rejected the suggestion that the pattern reflects wash trading, the practice of trading with oneself or a partner to create the appearance of volume. Its crypto lead said wash trading is "explicitly banned in our rulebook" and that the company has seen "no evidence" of collusion or wash trades. Kalshi attributes the repeated trade size to a liquidity-provider program in which market makers post resting orders of a fixed size that are filled again and again by different counterparties.
The company has also addressed the regulatory question directly. "We have not been contacted by the CFTC and don't believe there is any formal examination," spokesperson Elisabeth Diana said on Wednesday. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Michael Selig has said the agency has zero tolerance for wash trading.
The volume ratio does not settle the dispute. Market makers who post and refill orders all day can generate heavy volume while holding few positions overnight, which is how Kalshi describes its program. Trades that net out between related parties would produce the same pattern. What separates the two is who stands on each side of the $5,500 fills, and that information sits with the exchange and its regulator.
The stakes are larger than one contract. Cryptocurrency is Kalshi's second-largest category, with about $6 billion of trading in July, and volume is one of the main measures investors use to value a trading platform. Kalshi has also filed with the CFTC to list more perpetual-style contracts.
Two developments would move the question forward: any statement from the CFTC on the ether market, and trade-level data showing how many distinct counterparties sit behind the $5,500 fills. A change in the liquidity program's structure would also show up quickly, in whether volume in the contract holds at current levels once the fixed-size orders are reduced.