Kalshi’s Headline Volume and Execution-Price Turnover Are Different Measures.

Kalshi said in May that its annualized trading volume had risen from $52 billion to $178 billion in six months, a figure the company cited alongside a $1 billion funding round and its argument that prediction-market adoption was accelerating.

MSR Decode independently reconstructed the statistic and came very close.

Using Kalshi’s $1-face contract-volume convention, October 2025 annualized to about $52.06 billion, while April 2026 annualized to about $175.77 billion.

That is growth of 237.7%.

But when we measured the same underlying trading activity using the prices at which contracts actually traded, the result was different.

On that basis, annualized execution-price turnover rose from about $23.85 billion to $64.49 billion — growth of 170.4%.

Both measures are legitimate.

They simply answer different questions.

And newer data on Kalshi’s combo markets now show how changes in product mix can make those measures diverge.

Kalshi contracts can settle at as much as $1.

So under a $1-face contract-volume measure, one contract contributes $1 of volume regardless of whether it traded at 50 cents, 10 cents or 2 cents.

Consider 100 contracts trading at 5 cents.

Under the $1-face measure:

100 contracts = $100 of volume.

Measured at the actual transaction price:

100 × $0.05 = $5 of execution-price turnover.

Nothing about either number is inherently wrong.

They measure different things.

The distinction becomes important when the mix of products changes.

If increasingly large amounts of trading occur in low-priced contracts, each dollar of execution-price turnover can generate more $1-face contract volume than before.

That is where combos enter the picture.

New public Dune data allow Kalshi combo activity to be separated from the rest of the exchange from June onward.

In June, combos represented about 36.1% of Kalshi’s $1-face volume.

By August, that had risen to 44.6%.

But combos accounted for only about 9% to 10% of execution-price turnover throughout that period.

That difference is substantial.

In August:

• total Kalshi $1-face volume was about $40.03 billion;
• execution-price turnover was about $11.43 billion;
• combo $1-face volume was about $17.84 billion;
• combo execution-price turnover was only about $1.10 billion.

So combos generated roughly 44.6% of the headline face-value volume, while representing just 9.6% of execution-price turnover.

It means cheap contracts generate much more $1-face volume per dollar of transaction-price activity.

Across all Kalshi markets in August, the ratio between $1-face volume and execution-price turnover was about:

3.50×

In other words, every $1 of execution-price turnover corresponded to roughly $3.50 of $1-face volume.

But when combos are removed, the multiplier falls to about:

2.15×.

That is a meaningful difference.

Combos were therefore not just another category contributing volume.

Their low prices mechanically increased the amount of headline face-value volume produced by a given amount of transaction-price trading.

To test that more carefully, we asked a simple counterfactual question:

What would August’s face-to-execution multiplier have looked like if combos had remained at their June share of Kalshi’s face-value volume?

In reality, August’s multiplier was:

3.501×

Holding the June combo share constant produces a counterfactual multiplier of about:

3.125×

The difference is approximately:

0.376×.

In plain English, the increase in combo share from June to August mechanically pushed Kalshi’s overall face-value multiplier higher.

Kalshi’s total multiplier moved only from about 3.42× in June to 3.50× in August.

The estimated combo-mix effect is larger than that net increase because other changes inside combo and non-combo markets moved in the opposite direction and partially offset it.

So it would be wrong to say:

“Combos explain all of Kalshi’s volume growth.”

They do not.

What the data support is narrower:

The increasing share of low-priced combo markets materially amplified the gap between Kalshi’s $1-face volume and execution-price turnover from June through August.

There is one important historical limitation.

Our original growth comparison covers October 2025 to April 2026.

The public Dune combo series we can reproduce begins only in June 2026.

That means we cannot currently calculate exactly how much of the original 237.7% versus 170.4% growth gap was caused by combos.

The April baseline does not contain the combo/non-combo split required for that decomposition.

So two findings should be kept separate.

From October to April:

• $1-face contract volume grew 237.7%
• execution-price turnover grew 170.4%

The choice of measurement therefore materially changes the apparent pace of growth.

As combos became a larger share of Kalshi activity, they mechanically increased the difference between face-value volume and execution-price turnover.

The historical data needed for that exact calculation are not publicly available in the series we reconstructed.

Kalshi can reasonably argue that $1-face contract volume is a legitimate market statistic.

It is.

A trader who buys one million contracts genuinely traded one million contracts, and those contracts can each settle for as much as $1.

Kalshi also did not say that its $52 billion and $178 billion figures represented the amount buyers paid for contracts.

The issue is interpretation.

When product mix changes substantially — especially toward cheaper contracts — growth in the number and face value of contracts can outpace growth in trading activity measured at transaction prices.

That distinction matters when volume is being used as evidence of how quickly a market or platform is growing.

By August, Kalshi generated roughly $3.50 of $1-face volume for every $1 of execution-price turnover.

Without combos, that ratio would have been closer to $2.15.

That does not make the $3.50 figure false.

It tells us that the economic meaning of Kalshi’s headline volume increasingly depends on what kinds of contracts people are trading and at what prices.

That distinction becomes especially important when cheap combo markets grow rapidly.

Kalshi’s trading activity unquestionably grew rapidly.

Measured using the company’s $1-face contract-volume convention, the October-to-April increase was about 238%.

Measured at execution prices, the same underlying period grew about 170%.

Newer data provide part of the explanation for why those measures can diverge.

By August, combos accounted for almost 45% of Kalshi’s face-value volume but less than 10% of execution-price turnover. Their increasing share mechanically raised the platform’s overall face-to-execution multiplier by about 0.38× relative to a constant-June-share counterfactual.

“Kalshi’s volume is fake.”

It is:

Kalshi’s headline volume and transaction-price trading activity are increasingly different economic measures, and the rise of cheap combo contracts materially widens that gap.

For anyone using headline volume to judge Kalshi’s growth, market share or scale, that distinction matters.