Kalshi files to end volume incentive program tied to its ether perpetual tape

Kalshi has filed to end its volume incentive program, The Defiant reported, after a stretch in which the exchange's ether perpetual tape drew attention for repeated same-size trades. The filing includes two specifics: the reward pools exclude members with market-maker agreements, and Kalshi cited separate liquidity payments in explaining the repeated same-size ether perpetual prints. Wash-trading allegations have attached to those prints.

The repeated prints were never hidden. Kalshi's own API showed a single repeating trade size accounting for more than half the venue's ether tape, and the reading then was that the ether perp prints were a policy artifact — an incentive budget, not organic demand, writing the volume number. A clip that repeats at one size records how orders arrive, not how many counterparties stand behind them. Ending the program stops the subsidy, though it leaves the prints already made exactly where they are.

As this publication has reported, no rule obliges a venue to footnote that number in a filing. Kalshi has said its headline figure tracks an industry convention, which leaves the definition of the number with the exchange itself. The Clarity Act's failure in the Senate at 49-50 pushed market-structure definitions to the SEC and CFTC, so the conduct rules a venue like Kalshi answers to are produced largely by the venue's own filings and its regulator's existing authority.

Kalshi's core asset is the ability to list event contracts under federal oversight rather than state gaming law, and that ability is contested. A circuit split over who polices those contracts could reach the Supreme Court. Nothing in the reporting says the incentive program broke a rule.

Excluding market-maker agreement holders from the reward pools suggests the repeated volume came from participants other than the venue's designated liquidity providers, though that reads as an inference from the filing's structure and not as a claim about anyone's intent. Kalshi's competing answer — separate liquidity payments — explains the same pattern, and only the tape can separate the two.

So watch the tape. If the repeat clip disappears as the reward pools close, the incentive explanation holds. If the same dollar size keeps arriving at the same cadence, Kalshi will need a second account of where its ether volume comes from, and the volume figure it has published will outlive the program that produced it.