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Bitcoin, ether perpetual volumes on Kalshi are dominated by an unusual, repetitive trade, data shows 4 hours ago

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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. 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. The target itself changed over time. 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. Bitcoin also showed a similar trading pattern. 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.