Kalshi leads on 1 of 4 shared benchmarks, Paradex on 3. Kalshi wins on Perp DEX volume share, live 24h notional ranked ($707.99M vs $13.26M). Paradex wins on Most tradable markets on a perp DEX, live count per venue (64 vs 23), Perp DEX asset breadth (23 vs 7), Perp DEX volume to open interest (0.660x vs 19.8x). Data as of 2026-10-06 UTC.
Read methodology Last measured Window: rolling 24h6 shared benchmarks, 4 measured on both sides
CFTC-regulated US prediction market exchange. REST trade API (trade-api/v2) with documented per-tier rate limits; the market data WebSocket requires authentication.
Funding is signed. Positive means longs pay shorts, negative means longs get paid to hold. Venues settle on different native periods (hourly on Hyperliquid, dYdX, Lighter, Extended, Pacifica, Ondo, Vest, StandX and ApeX, every 4h on edgeX, every 8h on Kalshi, Aster and the CEX books); every figure is normalized from the venue's own quoted rate and interval before ranking. Funding is only the holding cost. Opening costs (taker fee, spread, impact) are the companion bench perp-fees.
Ranked only with 24 hours of funding history (288 samples) and a stddev above zero: a young listing, or a venue whose rate has not moved since listing (Ondo Perps at launch, Polymarket in July), reads artificially stable and shows as Provisional, never as the leader. Stability is not directionality: a persistently positive but tight band ranks above a rate that flips every settlement.
Counts reflect each venue's live market catalog at query time, mainnet
only. The asset class comes from the venue's own metadata where it
publishes one; Hyperliquid HIP-3 dexes and dYdX publish none, so their
symbols are matched against the crypto markets the other venues list
and a fixed table of forex, commodity and index names. Tokenized gold
(PAXG, XAUT) is a crypto token and is not counted. A market counts once
whether it trades 24/7 or only during exchange hours.
The ratio is a screen, not a verdict. Both terms are the venue's own
figures (24h volume and open interest as each API reports them, in USD),
so a venue that counts both legs of a fill moves its ratio without
changing anything real. A very low ratio (Ostium, 0.2x) means positions
held for days on thin daily volume; a very high one (Kalshi, above 40x)
means a day of trading dwarfs what stays open. The bands in the
methodology say what each range usually means.
Frequently asked questions
Kalshi vs Paradex: which one is better?
Kalshi and Paradex are compared on 6 shared OpenChainBench benchmarks. Kalshi leads on Perp DEX volume share, live 24h notional ranked. Paradex leads on Most tradable markets on a perp DEX, live count per venue. See the live table on this page for every metric.
Which has the higher 24h perp volume, Kalshi or Paradex?
On the Perp DEX volume share, live 24h notional ranked benchmark, Kalshi leads at $707.99M versus Paradex at $13.26M. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.
Which has the higher active markets, Kalshi or Paradex?
On the Most tradable markets on a perp DEX, live count per venue benchmark, Paradex leads at 64 versus Kalshi at 23. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.
How is the Kalshi vs Paradex comparison measured?
Every benchmark on this page uses the same open methodology, published at https://openchainbench.com/methodology. Data is CC-BY-4.0. Measurement harnesses are MIT-licensed.
Auto-generated pairs require: both providers in the same benchmark for seven consecutive days, at least 1000 samples per provider, observable third-party search demand, and a public /products/[slug] page on OCB. Editorially curated pairs (like this one) may publish early when search demand is high and data is accruing; panels with fewer than 100 samples are shown as provisional. The full pair ledger is versioned in the public repo.
