Crypto Exchanges
By James Thorp
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What Kalshi Says About the $5,500 Trades. The exchange's head of crypto, who goes by IcoBeast, pushed back on Beni's read of the situation.
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The CFTC's Role and Prior Warnings. The CFTC has flagged this kind of thing before. Volume-based incentive programs, the regulator has…
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Thousands of identical trades. Same size, over and over. Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated U.S. exchange, is now facing hard questions about whether its ether futures market volume is real.
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The scrutiny came from Beni, a former quantitative trader and co-founder of Stealth Neolab, who dug into Kalshi's public trade data and didn't like what he found.
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Kalshi did recently update its rebate program. The CFTC certified that update on September 16.
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So Kalshi's position is basically: the rebate program exists, it's CFTC-certified, and it has built-in guardrails against the exact behavior Beni is describing.
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Whether those guardrails actually worked is a different question.
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The CFTC has flagged this kind of thing before. Volume-based incentive programs, the regulator has warned, can push traders toward unnecessary activity just to hit volume targets…
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More context: Kalshi and Coinbase Compete to Launch Stock Perpetual Futures in US Markets
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That could change. Beni said he's still reviewing additional evidence, and legal experts are going through the materials before anything more goes public.
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Kalshi's broader trajectory makes the timing awkward. Back in June, the exchange's bitcoin perpetual market hit $1 billion in volume in just a few days.
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The open interest figure is what really sticks out. A market with $3.1 million in open interest generating $539 million in a single day of volume isn't normal.
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Beni's background matters here. He's not a random critic. Quantitative traders read order books and market structure for a living.
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And Kalshi's explanation isn't nothing. Prediction markets and perpetual futures really do work differently. Rebate programs really do generate clustering in trade sizes.
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But possible isn't the same as proven. And the volume-to-open-interest gap is still sitting there, unexplained.
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