Kalshi denies CFTC probe as $5B in uniform Ether trades draws wash-trading claims

Kalshi has pushed back against claims that its Ether perpetual futures market was inflated by wash trading, saying the regulator tasked with policing US derivatives markets has not reached out to the firm about the matter.

Elisabeth Diana, the company's head of communications, said in a statement to Cointelegraph: "We have not been contacted by the CFTC and don't believe there is any formal examination." She dismissed the speculation around the trades as "rumors seeded by competitors" and added, "Don't believe everything you read on X."

Her comments followed a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday, which cited a person familiar with the situation in saying the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was looking into a burst of transactions clustered at roughly $5,500 apiece in Kalshi's Ether perpetual futures market. Wash trading — the practice of generating activity on both sides of a trade without any real change in ownership or risk — is prohibited, and the pattern drew those allegations.

The scale of the activity is substantial. Trades of about $5,500 each added up to more than $5 billion in Ether perps volume over the past month, per the Journal, which also reported — citing sources aware of the arrangements — that Kalshi gave some participants the chance to buy equity in the company upon hitting volume goals, waived their fees, and paid monthly cash sums to attract large liquidity providers.

Kalshi responded in a Wednesday blog post, arguing that the repeated trade size matches how its liquidity incentives work. The programs compensate market makers — traders who keep standing buy and sell quotes posted so others always have someone to transact with — for having orders available at particular sizes within a fixed price band. Crucially, Kalshi said, the rewards flow for order availability rather than for executed volume.

The company offered a mechanical explanation for the uniform sizing: a single market maker posting fixed-size resting orders would naturally accumulate trades of identical size as many separate takers lift them. In this case, Kalshi said, hundreds of distinct accounts traded against one maker's quotes, with the takers repeatedly catching favorable prices when Ether moved on other venues before the maker adjusted theirs. The takers came out ahead "pretty consistently," while the maker lost "pretty consistently," according to Kalshi.

"The fixed size trades are entirely consistent with a single maker putting up resting orders of a fixed size and getting traded against by many takers," the company wrote. It framed that asymmetry as evidence of genuine commerce: in a wash trade, by contrast, volume rises while neither party books a profit or loss.

The scrutiny lands at a sensitive moment for a fast-growing product. Kalshi launched perpetual futures — instruments that let traders take leveraged directional bets on an asset's price without ever owning it — in May, and told CNBC a week later that volume on the new markets had already topped $1 billion.

One open thread remains unaddressed: Kalshi's blog post offered no comment on the equity grants tied to volume milestones that the Journal described. Whether the CFTC follows up, and whether Diana's characterization holds, may depend on questions neither the company nor the paper's sourcing can settle.