How Kalshi works: prices, contracts, settlement.

Every Kalshi market is a single yes-or-no question: will the Fed cut rates in September, will Bitcoin close above a stated level at 3pm. Buy YES and you receive $1 per contract if the answer is yes, nothing if it is not. Buy NO and the logic flips. The price you pay is your maximum loss; there is no leverage and no margin call.

A contract trading at 63 cents implies the market rates the event about 63 percent likely. Pay 63 cents, collect $1 when right: the price only makes sense as a probability. When news arrives, the price revises the way a forecast does. That single property makes the rest of this hub possible, because every trade on the tape is a probability opinion with money attached.

Buying NO at 30 cents is the identical position to selling YES at 70 cents. The two prices always sum to $1, so there is no separate mechanism for betting against an outcome. Every executed trade pairs a YES holder with a NO holder. When WhaleScanr reports a trade's side, it reports which side the aggressor took.

Each market runs one central order book of resting bids and offers. A trader who posts a price and waits is the maker; a trader who crosses the spread to hit a resting order is the taker. The public tape records the taker's side on every print, which is why flow direction can be read at all. Makers are paid for patience through lower fees; takers pay for immediacy.

Kalshi charges takers 0.07 times price times one minus price per contract, rounded up on the order total, which peaks at 1.75 cents on a 50 cent contract and shrinks toward both extremes. Makers pay a quarter of the taker rate. On 100 contracts at 54 cents, the taker fee is about $1.74. The full arithmetic, measured against a real week of tape, is in Kalshi fees, measured.

Every market carries written rules naming a resolution source, the specific authority or data feed that decides the outcome. At settlement each contract pays $1 or $0 and ceases to exist. The rules settle the market, not the headline: if the rules name the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS figure decides, whatever anyone else publishes. Traders who skip the rules eventually learn the word rulescucked.

Measured from one full day of Kalshi's public tape, July 2026: 7.33 million trades. Sports were 44.9 percent of them and crypto another 44.9 percent, a dead heat. A single series, KXBTC15M, the 15-minute Bitcoin market, accounted for 28.9 percent of every trade on the exchange. Kalshi's public image is politics; on this day, politics and elections together were under 0.4 percent of trades.