Bitcoin, ether perpetual volumes on Kalshi are dominated by an unusual, repetitive trade, data shows
CoinDesk found one $5,499 trade size accounting for 57% of sampled ether-perpetual volume, while recurring $2,500 and $5,000 trade sizes made up 54% of sampled bitcoin-perpetual volume.
A small number of repeating trade sizes accounted for more than half the value traded on Kalshi's bitcoin and ether perpetual-futures markets, according to a CoinDesk analysis of the exchange's public trade records.
On the ether market, trades valued within $2 of $5,499 accounted for $7.7 million, or 57%, of the $13.5 million in transactions CoinDesk analyzed from Sept. 17 through Sept. 20. On bitcoin, two recurring trade sizes worth about $2,500 and $5,000 accounted for 54% of the $8.5 million data sampled over the same period.
Volume is one of the first metrics traders use to judge how active and liquid a market is — in other words, whether they can buy or sell without significantly moving the price.
High volume can also make a new market appear more widely used. So if a large share of that activity comes from the same recurring trade sizes, understanding who or what is generating those trades is important for assessing what the volume actually represents.
For example, if a publicly traded stock reports millions of dollars in trading volume each day, traders may assume there are plenty of buyers and sellers on both sides, making the stock worth trading.
However, those numbers alone don’t reveal how many different traders generated such activity. In this case, a large share of Kalshi’s volume came from the same set of recurring trade sizes, making it important to understand what was driving the pattern.
In 43 of 46 one-hour samples CoinDesk examined between June 19 and Sept. 20, ether trades repeatedly clustered around recurring specific dollar targets. The prevailing trade size accounted for about 45% of the value across those samples and more than half of the value on 15 dates.
The number of contracts involved changed as ether's price moved, while the dollar value of the trades remained nearly fixed. That pattern is consistent with one or more automated trading programs executing predetermined dollar amounts, known among traders as ‘clips.’
Kalshi is a U.S. derivatives exchange regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and best known for its prediction markets. It added bitcoin perpetual futures, or contracts that track the asset without expiring, in late May.
Kalshi divides the exposure into small contracts, which traded near $2.70 apiece on Monday. CoinDesk analyzed 3,450 ether-perpetual trades across 23 one-hour samples during the four-day period using the exchange’s public API datasets. Of those, 1,406 landed within $2 of $5,499.
That recurring $5,499 dollar target remained nearly stable even as the number of contracts required to reach it changed with ether's price. Ether rose from around $1,700 to $2,500 between June and September, forcing the number of contracts in each trade to keep changing while the dollar target stayed almost fixed. A trade in the July cluster held about 2,800 contracts, against roughly 2,200 in September.
Trades clustered around $4,999 in CoinDesk’s earlier samples, while trades near $9,999 accounted for 72% of the sampled value on June 28. A recurring $3,999 target first appeared on Aug. 10, followed by $4,499 on Aug. 18 and $5,499 on Aug. 24.
By June 19, three weeks after Kalshi launched its cryptocurrency perpetual futures, trades worth almost exactly $4,999 accounted for 37% of the ether contract value CoinDesk sampled that hour.
Two recurring sizes move in lockstep as bitcoin’s price changed, with the larger trade staying almost exactly twice the size of the smaller one. The larger was exactly twice the smaller in 9 of the 22 samples that contained both. In the other 13, the larger trade was just one contract above double the smaller one, a difference consistent with rounding.
When bitcoin traded near $76,300, the pair was 327 and 655 contracts, while on Monday it was 307 and 614.
Kalshi's ether perpetual is also showed unusually heavy trading relative to the position that remained open. A snapshot on Monday showed about 93 million contracts of 24-hour volume against 1.5 million of open interest (the number of outstanding positions), producing a volume-to-open interest ratio of 61. Meaning, roughly 61 contracts changed hands during the day for every contract left open by traders.
That was the second-highest ratio among the 20 Kalshi perpetual markets with open interest, compared with a median of about eight. The bitcoin contract's ratio was 26. Although it’s worth noting that high turnover by itself doesn’t necessarily mean any improper trading
CoinDesk asked Kalshi whether one or several participants produced the repeating ether and bitcoin trade sizes, whether any were covered by market-making or incentive arrangements, and whether the exchange had found self-matching or common ownership among the accounts. Kalshi hadn’t responded by press time.
Such repeated trade sizes are typically a feature of an algorithmic strategy targeting a fixed dollar value and recalculating the number of contracts as prices move, a execution mechanic detailed in quantitative literature on dynamic position scaling like Cartea, Jaimungal, & Ricci's Algorithmic and High-Frequency Trading.
Bots scale their quotes and contract sizes dynamically to hedge against adverse price action and control risk exposure, a concept proven by the landmark Avellaneda-Stoikov Model.
In Kalshi's case, the shifts from roughly $4,999 to $3,999, $4,499 and $5,499 suggest that the strategy’s notional-size parameters were periodically adjusted.
However, public order-book data cannot establish whether the activity reflected legitimate trading or rebate farming.
Trading became exceptionally cheap for some firms that settled their own transactions directly with Kalshi shortly before CoinDesk’s four-day sample began.
A rebate program filed with the CFTC took effect on Sept. 16, cutting fees for those firms to 0.003% and paying market makers a rebate of the same size. It began one day before the four-day sample but almost a month after the $5,499 trades first appeared. That means the program does not explain the emergence of the recurring trade sizes, though it could affect the economics of trading during the later sample.