Over a single 24-hour window, Kalshi’s newly launched ether perpetual contract recorded $539 million in trading volume. Open positions at that same moment held just $3.1 million.
A gap of 174-to-1 between those two figures has triggered the fiercest dispute the regulated U.S. prediction market has seen since it began offering crypto perpetual futures, and it sits at the heart of a claim that Kalshi’s volume is not genuine.
Trades that appear suspiciously uniform
The accusation was raised by Beni, a quantitative analyst who co-founded Stealth Neolab and posts on X under that handle. After highlighting the ETH-PERP volume-to-open-interest disparity, he took the analysis further and drew attention to a run of repeated $5,500 trade sizes.
According to his tally, those identical trades on their own accounted for up to 58% of all of Kalshi’s ether perpetual volume across four different days. He described this as “undeniable proof” that volume was being manipulated.
The significance of the ratio comes down to what the two numbers represent. Open interest captures the total dollar value of contracts that remain outstanding at any given point. Volume, by contrast, counts the total dollar value of contracts that traded hands within a defined period. When volume exceeds open interest by a factor of more than a hundred, the standard interpretation is wash trading: buying and selling that inflates the activity count while the capital actually at risk hardly changes.
A fee structure that can cancel itself out
The second piece of evidence Beni presented was a rebate schedule that Kalshi submitted to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Under that schedule, certain Self-Clearing Members qualify for a 0.3-basis-point maker rebate, which offsets a 0.3-basis-point taker fee and leaves a net fee of zero.
From there his reasoning is straightforward: when trading against yourself carries no cost, the motivation to pump up volume increases.
Rebates in themselves are nothing unusual. Exchanges routinely offer partial fee refunds or cash payments to high-volume market makers as an incentive to post more liquidity. What Beni questioned is the outcome when a rebate wipes out the fee altogether.
Two rounds of pushback from Kalshi’s product lead
IcoBeast.eth, who runs product development at Kalshi, initially dismissed the concerns on X, arguing that the platform’s fee structure by itself ought to discourage manipulators. After the thread spread widely, he returned with a more detailed response.
He began by pointing to a confusion in Beni’s original post. The Artemis chart referenced in the complaint, he explained, tracked prediction-market share rather than perpetual contract volume.
Why the volume figures are inflated by convention
He then explained the reporting method, which Kalshi shares with Polymarket. Volume is recorded as the maximum possible payout rather than the cash a trader actually commits.
Because every event contract pays precisely $1 to the winning side, the industry measures volume as the total number of $1 outcomes at stake. Purchasing 100,000 contracts at 30 cents means spending $30,000 in cash, yet the system logs $100,000 in volume, since that is what the contracts are worth when they mature.
The result is a headline number that exceeds the cash actually involved. In IcoBeast.eth’s telling, though, the demand underlying that figure is genuine rather than fabricated.
Who can become a Self-Clearing Member
Turning to the perpetuals directly, IcoBeast.eth rejected the suggestion that Kalshi cherry-picks an exclusive circle of Self-Clearing Members. Under CFTC rules, “fair access” is a legal obligation, meaning any firm that meets the capital and operational thresholds has the right to participate.
“Separately on perps you claimed that ‘Here SCM means market makers that are selected by Kalshi lmfao.’ This isn’t true. Anyone can become a Self-Clearing Member of a CFTC regulated exchange as long as they meet the regulatory requirements. ‘Fair access’ is a reg requirement for us,” IcoBeast.eth said.
He also noted that Kalshi provides no rebates whatsoever on its crypto event prediction contracts.
Rebates are everywhere, but Kalshi’s are on public record
IcoBeast.eth made no attempt to portray rebate programs as rare. CME Group, Hyperliquid and Binance all operate them, he conceded. What sets Kalshi apart, in his view, is transparency.
Because it operates as a regulated Designated Contract Market, Kalshi must file every incentive program publicly with the CFTC rather than arranging them behind closed doors. That very filing is what Beni relied on to construct his argument.
“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 (US perps). 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,” he said.
The question the response doesn’t answer
At the time of writing, Kalshi had not replied to a request for comment, leaving IcoBeast.eth’s thread as the company’s sole public stance. Ether was changing hands at $2,661.85 while the dispute unfolded.
His account addresses the payout convention and the membership rules. As written, however, it does not directly confront the $5,500 trades, which is precisely the pattern Beni identified as his most compelling evidence. Until someone at Kalshi accounts for those trades, the debate remains unresolved.