Prediction market platform Kalshi is under scrutiny for facilitating close to a million trades of nearly identical sizes in a single market, according to a report published on Tuesday.
Why Are So Many Kalshi Trades the Same Size?
Over one-third of Kalshi’s trading volume speculating on the price of Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) was rapid trades clustered around the same order size—$5,500, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.
Overall, trades executed at $5,500 generated more than $5 billion in Ethereum perpetual volume over the past month, the report said.
Wash trading is a form of market manipulation where an entity simultaneously buys and sells the same financial asset to create a false illusion of market activity.
Wash Trading ‘Explicitly Banned’
Pseudonymous quant analyst and Stealth Neolab co-founder Beni made similar allegations last week, stating that the $5,500 trades accounted for as much as 58% of Kalshi’s Ethereum perpetual volume across four separate days.
Kalshi cryptocurrency lead IcoBeast dismissed the allegations, arguing that Kalshi’s fee structure should deter wash trading and that critics had mixed up Kalshi’s prediction-market activity with its perpetual-futures business.
In a separate blog post on Tuesday, Kalshi said wash trading is "explicitly banned in our rulebook," and the platform has seen “no evidence” of collusion or wash trades.
Kalshi attributed the repeated trade sizes to its liquidity-provider program, saying market makers post resting orders at fixed sizes that can be repeatedly filled by different traders.
The CFTC, which oversees prediction markets in the U.S., didn’t immediately return Benzinga’s request for comment.
Notably, a study by Columbia University last year estimated that nearly 25% of Polymarket’s volume in the previous three years was wash trading.
The researchers, however, did not accuse Polymarket of being complicit in the activity.
Kalshi and Benzinga have an existing data collaboration agreement.
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