What whale trades look like on Kalshi.

A flat dollar cutoff fails in both directions: it floods a feed with routine prints from deep Bitcoin markets and misses a genuinely enormous trade in a thin one. WhaleScanr instead measures every trade against the market it lands in, using that market's own trailing activity: a print qualifies when it is large next to the market's average daily flow or its own biggest recent trades. A market with too little history produces no whale events at all. Unknown liquidity means "large" is undefined, and no judgment is made.

Each event carries a multiple comparing its notional to the market's typical large trade, defined as its 95th percentile print. The average is the wrong yardstick: the average trade in a thin market is a $40 ticket, so everything real is hundreds of times average and the number stops discriminating. Against the 95th percentile, "8× typical" asks whether this trade is big even among the big money here, and it means roughly the same thing in a deep Fed market and a thin sports one. Past 25 times, the badge reads 25×+, because beyond that the multiple no longer separates anything.

The cheapest way to look like a whale is to buy a near-certain favorite in size. A $100,000 print at 95 cents is a claim on odds the market already calls settled: big dollars, little conviction. WhaleScanr keeps the detection but damps the weight of events priced near the extremes, so a run of 95 cent favorites cannot dominate rankings the way a mid-priced position of the same size would. The badge tells the reader what kind of whale they are looking at; the damping keeps the leaderboards honest.

The largest whales become public only when they surface themselves or a reporter finds them. During the 2026 World Cup, a publicly reported position of $10.5 million ran through Kalshi's soccer markets, among the largest event-contract positions ever reported. In 2024, the French trader known as Théo placed tens of millions on the US presidential election on Polymarket, reportedly clearing about $85 million after commissioning his own polls. Both cases show what the tape reveals and what it hides: the prints were visible to anyone watching, and the names came later, from reporting, not from the tape.

Alerts ranks the largest tracked-wallet trades over recent windows. Alerts streams every event the moment it clears its market's thresholds. Both read straight from the public tape; nothing is shown that was not printed.