Kalshi bot halts after wash trading suspicions emerge

A trading bot that had been executing cheap, uniform trades on a Zohran Mamdani Kalshi market has ceased its activity after drawing attention for potentially wash trading the platform's perp volume.

The wash trading accusations surfaced last weekend when a pseudonymous quant analyst named “Beni” claimed that Kalshi's 24-hour trading volume for ether perpetual contracts stood at $539 million, while open interest was just $3.1 million.

Beni also pointed to a series of $5,500 trades that purportedly accounted for 58% of Kalshi's ETH perp volume over four days.

Kalshi's crypto lead, IcoBeast.eth, had rebuffed Beni's claims forcefully, and now the platform has published its own article attempting to refute the argument and assert that the “wash trading rumors are false.”

i thought more about it. beni, sorry for being a dick. i shouldn't have attacked you personally. it was cocky and unnecessary, and i should have stuck to the facts.

i do want to clarify one thing: our incentives pay for liquidity, not wash trading. the claim that we’re…

— IcoBeast.eth (@icobeast) September 22, 2026

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Kalshi bot ceases its strange uniform trading

A specific bot was reportedly active on the 2028 Democratic Presidential Nominee market, specifically trading Mamdani's ticker. This is notable because Mamdani is ineligible for the presidency due to not being born in the United States.

Prediction market analyst TickerTracker compared the bot's activity to a metronome: it bought shares at two tenths of a cent and sold at one tenth of a cent in a cycle that repeated every four seconds over nearly two months.

Today, analysts noted that the bot ceased trading after the continuous back-and-forth.

Kalshi has the same wash trading pattern in its prediction markets too

Take the Mamdani "2028 Democratic presidential nominee" market

Between August 1 and September 19, someone has been buying and selling $1 of this contract every 2 seconds for $2M

The bot is active rn and you… https://t.co/dYRS6yO5qX pic.twitter.com/R35pn0oZkF

— Daniel Sapkota (@danielsapkota) September 21, 2026

Read more: CFTC orders Kalshi to continue operations amid New York lawsuit

Prediction market tool firm Resolve even claimed to have earned roughly $30 a day by trading against the bot.

Some users have suggested that the trades might just be a bug, while others suggested that the bot might be “someone farming volume for a higher rate limit tier.”

TickerTracker noted that notional volume within prediction markets is often inflated, and automated trading can be a normal occurrence.

They added that while these trades might break Kalshi's rules, “Maybe there’s a simpler explanation for these anomalies that we’re overlooking?”