The planned withdrawal will end a reward for completed trades, not all forms of liquidity support. The program excludes Kalshi affiliates and members with Market Maker Agreements. The Sept. 28 notice does not terminate those agreements or the separate Temporary Perpetual Fee Rebate Program.
The Ether Trade Pattern
The distinction separates the volume-reward wind-down from the payments Kalshi cited in its Sept. 22 defense of its perpetuals trading. The exchange said it pays market makers flat fees to maintain buy and sell orders meeting requirements for size, spread and time on the order book—not for how much they trade.
“The fixed size trades are entirely consistent with a single maker putting up resting orders of a fixed size and getting traded against by many takers,” Kalshi wrote. It said hundreds of distinct traders took the maker’s orders and that it had seen no evidence of collusion or wash trades.
The Defiant’s earlier analysis found a repeated-size cluster accounted for 47.2% of 120,000 consecutive ether perpetual trades sampled on Sept. 20–21, carrying 62.75% of the sample’s notional value. The clustered trades initially sat just below $5,500 before shifting to approximately $5,425.55. The public API did not identify counterparties, so the pattern alone could not establish wash trading.
The termination filing does not identify which perpetual markets had active volume-reward pools or the amounts paid. It therefore does not establish how much perpetual volume depended on the program being withdrawn.
Perpetual fee rebates are proceeding on a separate track. A Sept. 24 filing updates that program while retaining repayment of all net maker and taker fees to self-clearing members and limits against overlapping per-trade incentives creating net-negative fees. Those revised terms take effect upon exchange notice, no earlier than 5 p.m. ET on Oct. 8.
