Kalshi to End Liquidity Incentive Program Amid Wash Trading Allegations

The timing is the tell: Kalshi is retiring the very mechanism that helped drive record volume, which suggests the incentive design, not just the allegations, became a liability. That matters for prediction markets broadly, since liquidity programs are a standard tool for bootstrapping order books and now carry reputational risk if they can be framed as inflating activity. The open question is whether the volume holds once incentives lapse, and whether other venues rethink similar programs under the same scrutiny.