Unchained · Friday, October 2, 2026
Kalshi, a regulated exchange, is under investigation by the CFTC following allegations of significantly inflated derivatives volume. An analyst named Benny shared evidence suggesting market makers were incentivized to wash trade, artificially boosting volume figures. In response to the controversy and the WSJ report, Kalshi has announced the termination of its liquidity incentive program.
“And so he dropped this gigantic thread where he basically demonstrated that Kalshi was their perps volume, which I think to anybody who's been looking at the perps on Kalshi is not that big of a surprise, given they have three million of open interest and hundreds of millions of dollars of volume on any given day.”
“And then second showed that there was lots of $5,500 that were getting traded repeatedly back and forth all day long, visible in the public order books of Colshie's Perf volumes.”
“This led to a very dramatic pile-on. I think the entire internet got incensed about this whole, you know, kind of autistic guy showing up this $40 billion company. This led eventually to them walking it back.”
“Wall Street Journal reported that CFTC was investigating Kulshi and some of their volume claims. And then lastly, I think it was yesterday, that Kulshi announced that they were ending their liquidity incentives program around all of this involved, which presumably should lead to an end of this behavior and maybe not as much volume happening on Kulshi perps.”