Kalshi’s reported trading figures have come under heavy scrutiny, and the criticism that began with its crypto perpetuals has now spread to its main prediction market business.
The initial dispute centered on crypto perpetual contracts. Some traders said ETH perpetual open interest was only around a few million dollars, while daily trading volume reached hundreds of millions of dollars, leaving turnover unusually high. Kalshi crypto business lead IcoBeast later responded by separating the perpetuals business from the crypto prediction market, saying the prediction market does not have the same type of market-making rebates and that its reporting methodology can be compared with peers.
The discussion did not end with perpetuals. Claims that Kalshi was inflating activity soon extended to the platform’s prediction market operation.
Debate focuses on how multi-event combo bets are counted
Well-known prediction market trader @retardmode said about 61% of Kalshi’s publicly disclosed volume comes from multi-event combination bets. These are effectively parlays, where several event outcomes are bundled into one ticket and every leg must be correct for the bet to pay out.
According to the post, Kalshi does not calculate volume based on the amount of money a user actually puts in. Instead, it counts volume using the $1 face value of each contract. In the example given, a user spends $1 to buy a combo ticket that would pay $14.1 if every leg wins, but the platform records that trade as $14.1 in volume.
The trader also said that nearly half of these combo tickets include wagers on more than 11 events, making the probability of winning extremely low.
Estimated real volume trails reported figures by a wide margin
Using that methodology, Kalshi’s real trading volume yesterday was estimated at about $136 million, while the figure disclosed publicly was $1.91 billion.
@CarOnPolymarket, a leading trader on Polymarket, made a further estimate and said the real traded amount behind these combo bets may be only about 7.1% of the combo-bet volume Kalshi reports publicly. Extrapolated over a month, that could produce a gap as large as roughly $4 billion in real volume versus about $57 billion on paper.