📊 JUST IN: 81% of all Bitcoin hasn't moved in at least 6 months.

Long-term holders have added over 3 MILLION BTC since 2020, while only about 300,000 BTC moved out of older wallets in the first half of this year.

Retail investors sold a net 140,000 BTC in the first half of 2026, then bought back over 107,000 BTC in Q3, per River Financial.

❓ Is Kalshi Wash Trading? ❓

It's been a bruising week for Kalshi.

What started as a spat on crypto X between a trader and one of its employees has, within days, become a Wall Street Journal story and a reported look from the CFTC. For context, Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange where Americans bet on elections and football games, and since June it has run crypto perps too, the first legally available in the US.

On 19 September, IcoBeast, a Kalshi employee who built out its crypto markets programme, posted an Artemis chart showing the exchange with roughly 97% of "crypto volume" against Polymarket. Beni, a former quant and co-founder of Stealth Neolab, replied that much of it was wash traded. IcoBeast brushed him off with a reply that opened "cope. seethe. rage" and went on to question his intelligence, which turned out to be a mistake, because Beni came back with a thread openly framed as payback.

📊 What The Data Shows

➡️ Kalshi's ether perpetual logged roughly $539 million of volume in 24 hours against only $3.1 million of open interest, a ratio of about 174 to one.

➡️ We pulled the trade data ourselves, and the bitcoin contract runs at 67 times open interest. Those two markets are 90% of all perps volume on the venue.

➡️ The typical ratio across Kalshi's 23 other perps sits at about 8x, with HYPE at 2.1x and bitcoin cash at 2x.

➡️ Trades sized at almost exactly $5,500 made up 48% to 58% of the ether perp's notional volume across four separate days. CoinDesk found the same independently, with 1,406 of 3,450 sampled ether trades landing within $2 of $5,499.

👀 Kalshi's Answer

Kalshi published a blog post acknowledging that it pays market makers to keep liquidity on its perps books, while rejecting the wash trading charge.

You see, makers get a flat monthly fee for keeping two-sided quotes of a minimum size on the book. Kalshi's own example has a firm paid $100,000 a month to hold bids and offers of at least $5,000 within 0.1% of each other for 95% of every hour. Since July it has also refunded self-clearing members every dollar of trading fees on perps. So you end up with a maker obliged to quote a fixed size sitting next to faster traders who can pick it off for free whenever ether moves elsewhere, and every fill comes out the size of that resting order.

Kalshi says the takers were hundreds of distinct traders who made money while the maker lost it, and that self-trades are blocked mechanically. Notably, Rajiv Sethi, the Barnard economist who co-wrote one of the better-known academic methods for detecting wash trading, reached much the same conclusion. Though he added that the subsidies look "designed less for the provision of liquidity than the inflation of volume."

⚠️ Who Is On The Other Side

So, does that settle it? Well, legally it might. But it's also an admission that a large share of Kalshi's perps volume exists because Kalshi pays for both sides of it, and take away either the stipend or the rebate and those $5,500 prints most likely stop.

That leaves the bit nobody has answered, which is who the market maker actually is. The CFTC's recent staff advisory on incentive programmes warned that stipends and rebates can encourage artificial trading, and flagged the conflict when a maker is affiliated with the exchange. Kalshi's parent owns Kalshi Trading, an affiliated market maker that trades on Kalshi's own exchange, and Kalshi has yet to say who is quoting those orders.

➖➖➖➖➖

🔖 Bottom Line: Regulators are unlikely to bring a wash trading case here, though that was never really the exposure. Kalshi is reportedly in talks to raise $750 million at around $40 billion, months after closing at $22 billion, and fundraises like that lean heavily on a volume and revenue story. Investors now have a well-publicised reason to discount the perps numbers, landing in the same month the Ninth Circuit put its sports contracts, the bulk of volume on the other side of the business, in legal question. If there's a lesson here, it's that it's far cheaper to be civil to people online.

👀 Once again as US markets are closed, President Trump has:

- Rejected Iran’s 7-day ceasefire proposal

- Told aides he expects bombing of Iran to resume after the midterms

- Told Iran the US will NOT lift its naval blockade

Iran’s proposal would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and resumed nuclear talks in return for the US lifting its blockade of Iranian ports.

Trump adds he sees a ‘renewed bombing campaign’ as likely.

Get ready for another volatile weekend! 🇺🇸