By cryptoadmin Kalshi said it has not been contacted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and does not believe it is under formal investigation, pushing back against reports of regulatory scrutiny over trading activity on the prediction market.
“We have not been contacted by the CFTC and don't believe there is any formal examination,” Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana said in a statement. “As we’ve said, these data patterns are typical of liquidity incentive programs and common in financial markets.”
CoinDesk reported early Tuesday that a majority of trading volume on Kalshi’s bitcoin and ether perpetual markets was composed of identically-sized trades, with many ether perp trades clustered around $5,500 and bitcoin perp trades around $2,500 or $5.000.
The Wall Street Journal reported similar data later Tuesday and added that the CFTC was examining trading activity on Kalshi after nearly one million trades in an ether market were placed in similar amounts. The regulator was reviewing the data before deciding whether to open an enforcement investigation, according to the report.
The activity had already drawn attention from Beni, a co-founder of research firm Stealth Neolab, who said Kalshi’s ether perpetual recorded about $539 million in 24-hour volume against just $3.1 million in open interest. He later found that trades of exactly $5,500 made up 48% to 58% of notional volume on four days in September. Beni said the figures came from Kalshi’s public API.
Diana said the patterns can be explained by Kalshi’s liquidity incentive program, which rewards participants for providing liquidity.
“We send our data every day to them [the CFTC], and it's not that weird for them to sort of review our data on the regular,” Diana said in an interview.
The CFTC had not returned a request for comment sent Tuesday.
The scrutiny comes as prediction markets have grown rapidly, drawing more attention to how platforms report trading volume and police activity between participants. Liquidity incentive programs typically reward market participants for providing orders, helping create markets where other customers can buy or sell.
Kalshi said such incentives explain trading patterns that have attracted attention, including bursts of similarly sized trades.
Asked about protections against wash trading and self-trading, Diana said Kalshi has “tons of tools” and a “full surveillance team in place.” Wash trading involves transactions designed to create the appearance of market activity without a genuine change in economic exposure.