Fraud-related FUD surrounding Kalshi has spilled over to the prediction market: 61% of its bets are multi-event parlay wagers, and its actual trading volume is 14 times lower than its reported figures.

Recently, Kalshi’s crypto perpetual contract trading data has faced widespread skepticism from the community. The controversy began with crypto perpetual contracts: a trader noted that ETH perpetual open interest is only around millions of U.S. dollars, yet daily trading volume reaches hundreds of millions of dollars, with unusually high turnover. Kalshi’s head of crypto business, IcoBeast, responded by addressing the perpetual contracts and its crypto prediction markets separately, stating that prediction markets have no equivalent market maker rebates and their statistical methodology is comparable to industry peers. However, community discussions did not stop at perpetual contracts; suspicions of fraud spread to Kalshi’s core prediction market business. Prominent prediction market trader @retardmode posted that roughly 61% of Kalshi’s disclosed trading volume comes from "multi-event parlay bets" (called "串关" in Chinese), which bundle the outcomes of multiple events into a single ticket that requires all selections to be correct to win. The platform does not calculate volume based on users’ actual wagers, but instead uses a $1 par value per contract. For example, a user spending $1 on a parlay ticket that pays out $14.10 if all selections are correct will be recorded as $14.10 in trading volume. Nearly half of these parlay bets involve 11 or more events, resulting in extremely low win probabilities. Using this methodology, Kalshi’s actual trading volume yesterday was around $136 million, while its publicly disclosed figure was $1.91 billion. Top Polymarket trader @CarOnPolymarket further estimated that the actual trading volume of Kalshi’s parlay bets may only be roughly 7.1% of its disclosed parlay bet amount. Extrapolated monthly, this could create an extreme gap of approximately $4 billion in actual volume versus $57 billion in reported figures.