Written by: Mahe, Foresight News
On September 21, there was considerable controversy over the成交 data for Kalshi’s perpetual contracts. And just the day before, Kalshi had filed to launch perpetual futures contracts tied to U.S. individual stocks.
The controversy started with the turnover rate of the crypto perpetual contracts and then expanded to the company’s main business—its statistical methodology for event contracts.
Both sides in the dispute use public materials to make their case. The party alleging data fabrication points to the accused party’s positions, trading volume, repeated orders, and CFTC filings, arguing that the numbers don’t match natural trading. Kalshi’s crypto负责人, meanwhile, emphasizes that prediction markets and perpetual contracts are two different product lines. The incentive program has already been submitted to regulators for approval, so industry-standard notional-principal algorithms shouldn’t be labeled as fraud.
The spark came from a tweet
On September 20, Kalshi’s crypto head IcoBeast.eth posted a chart showing Kalshi crypto trading volume data occupying 96.7% of the market with $363.9 million, far ahead of Polymarket’s $12.3 million. However, users in the tweet comments questioned whether most of it was just volume-jacking. IcoBears.eth quickly responded: if the platform charges fees, who would bother to juice volume?
A few hours later, Beni (@beniduboss), who claims to be a former quant and current Stealth Neolab co-founder, published a long post. The core is one hard statement: Kalshi is falsifying crypto trading volume, and he can prove it. The post’s subsequent views exceeded 1.2 million.
Later that same day, Beni posted again saying: if Kalshi itself participates in, instructs, or turns a blind eye to incentives for this kind of behavior, it may constitute fraud or market manipulation; and he said he has “very interesting materials that can be shown to the CFTC.”
Beni seized on not just the order-book proportions, but also rule details. KalshiEX LLC filed an update with the CFTC on September 2, 2026 (an interim perpetual fee rebate plan). The document shows the plan does not take effect earlier than September 16 Eastern Time, and runs until December 31, 2026, or until the company otherwise amends or terminates it. For crypto perpetuals, for eligible taker fees, rebates can be as high as 0.3 basis points; makers can net 0.3 basis points. The applies-to party is all Self-Clearing Members (SCM). With both sides offsetting each other, trading costs on paper can be compressed to nearly zero.
The same document also includes exclusion clauses: if you are suspected of wash trading, self-trading, pre-arranged trades, or other abusive behavior, you may not claim the rebates; if multiple incentive programs stack and result in a net negative fee rate, the payment will be reduced; the Chief Regulator Officer may revoke eligibility and initiate disciplinary proceedings. In other words, the regulatory filing contains both the design of “pushing friction costs as low as possible” and the wording “prohibiting using rebates to juice volume.” The document can prove the fee structure exists, but it can’t prove rebates were applied to wash trades.
Beni also pulled out specific perpetual instruments to explain his suspicions in detail.
Beni said that Kalshi’s current ETH-PERP open interest is about $3.1 million, but the 24-hour trading volume is $538.6 million—equivalent to turning over all open positions about 174 times per day, or completing a turnover on average once every 8 minutes and 18 seconds.
Beni also pointed out that Kalshi’s position leaderboard shows the largest single ETH-PERP position is only about $17.6k, which is clearly inconsistent with the scale of the trading volume mentioned above.
In addition, Beni said Kalshi and Jump Trading had reached a cooperation arrangement in which equity was exchanged for liquidity, so he questioned whether there was a motive to boost the platform’s trading volume metrics. Beni also questioned Kalshi’s method of calculating trading volume, saying the platform uses the “number of traded contracts” as volume and displays it with dollar symbols in the interface, which could lead users to misunderstand the actual trading amount.
Kalshi’s response: prediction markets and crypto perpetuals are two different things
IcoBeast.eth quickly posted a reply. He didn’t go line by line on the 174x turnover; instead, he changed the battleground. He said the Artemis chart Beni started with showed prediction-market share, not perpetuals trading volume. Kalshi does not rebate crypto prediction markets. The algorithm for contract count versus notional amount is consistent with how prediction markets like Polymarket do it, so it’s like-for-like.
Regarding “SCM is the market maker chosen by Kalshi,” he denied it. In the designated contract markets regulated by the CFTC, as long as you meet regulatory requirements, anyone can become a self-clearing member—“fair access” is itself a regulatory requirement. He admitted perpetuals are still in the early stage, while emphasizing that CME, Hyperliquid, and Binance all use rebates and incentives to grow liquidity, and some platforms even offer negative market-making fee rates. The difference between Kalshi and offshore venues is that the incentive plan must be publicly filed.
This response has two effects. One is procedural correctness: prediction markets and perpetuals are indeed not the same product. In Kalshi’s glossary, for event contracts, “volume” is defined as “the number of traded contract lots,” while perpetuals involve margin, leverage, and funding fees. The other is evasion: what the community is truly watching is the ETH perpetual order book—millions of dollars in positions, hundreds of millions in daily trading volume, the largest single position on the leaderboard being under $20k, and later-flagged repeated fixed-lot counts. Cutting the product lines apart doesn’t explain why this order book looks like this.
Beni didn’t buy it on the spot. He claimed that 99% of perpetual trading volume was fake and vowed to keep dissecting the prediction market.
The controversy spreads to the core business: event contracts inflate the data
The never-ending debate isn’t over yet. Market forecaster @retardmode posted that the controversy has spread to Kalshi’s main business. He said Kalshi’s publicly disclosed trading volume includes about 61% from multi-event parlay bets. A user buys a $1 ticket for a parlay that pays out $14.1 if it wins; the platform records $14.1 as the trade volume at contract face value. In those parlays, nearly half are long chains of 11 events or more, with extremely low chances of winning. By this metric, the prior day’s real trading volume was about $136 million, while the external figure is $1.91 billion. He said this is basically deceiving investors.
Trader @CarOnPolymarket followed up with a further jab: “Kalshi counts the $1 used to bet on a 1000x parlay as $1000 trading volume. Yesterday, their real trading volume was $136 million, while the reported figure was $1.91 billion. In one month, that would mean $57 billion of fake trading volume versus $4 billion of real trading volume—no wonder they ‘break records’ every day.”
This is not the same kind of problem as the perpetuals issue.
The dispute is whether: Kalshi’s parlay share is too high; whether long parlays inflate paper volume to the point of losing reference value; and whether the interface uses dollar symbols to make the number of contracts look like cash. Beni pointed out that the glossary defines “volume” as the number of traded contract lots, but the interface also shows a dollar symbol next to the numbers—“Yes” for 100 lots at $0.30; the user actually pays $30,000, yet the interface can display $100,000. This is a matter of presentation, not repeated contract lots on the perpetuals order book. Mixing these two lines into a single claim that Kalshi is forging everything would entangle the accounting controversies that can be checked, along with volume-jacking accusations that regulators have not yet recognized.
According to defirate data, over the past 30 days, politics, sports, and crypto have remained the top three sectors by trading volume on Kalshi.
However, beneath the surface of a Twitter flame war, Kalshi’s current predicament is an absurd “compliance-driven volume-jacking gambling scheme.” Under pressure from Polymarket, Kalshi chose to polish the numbers to prop up its capital narrative. On one hand, it uses a 0-basis-point rebate to let market-making funds trade among themselves—left hand to right hand. On the other hand, it exploits long parlays with win probabilities approaching zero to fabricate a lottery-trap appearance, using crude accounting magic to inflate a $1 premium into thousands of dollars of apparent trading volume.
Maybe it’s the self-discipline and restraint of prediction-market players that’s the most precious thing in the whole industry.