Kalshi Paper Trading

You paper trade Kalshi two ways. Kalshi runs its own demo environment at demo.kalshi.co, a separate exchange with mock funds. Rivo, the prediction market terminal, places paper orders on live Kalshi markets: each one fills against the real order book with Kalshi's own taker fee and settles when the real market settles.

Our take: the two answer different questions. The demo tells you how Kalshi's order types and API behave. Paper mode on live markets tells you what your trade would have cost and paid. Learn the mechanics in the demo. Test your ideas against the real book.

What is the Kalshi demo account?

Kalshi's demo is a full practice copy of the exchange. Kalshi describes it as a place to explore the platform and practice trading with mock funds. Here is how it works:

• Address. The demo lives at demo.kalshi.co. Kalshi points out the address ends in .co.
• A separate login. Demo credentials are separate from real ones. You can use the same email in both, and nothing in the demo affects a real account.
• Mock sign-up details. Kalshi lets you sign up to the demo with mock personal information.
• Mock funds. A new demo account starts with no balance. You add mock money with Kalshi's published test card numbers, a sandbox bank link or test USDC on a test network. Never send real crypto to a demo deposit address.
• Its own markets. Kalshi's documentation says the price and behavior of markets in the demo may not reflect real markets.

What is the Kalshi demo API?

The demo runs the same trade API on its own hosts, with its own keys:

A demo key works on demo hosts only, and a real key on real hosts only. The demo is the right place to test code that signs requests, places orders, cancels them and reconnects a stream, because a bug there costs mock money. Signing, order fields and rate limits are covered in the Kalshi API guide.

How do you paper trade live Kalshi markets?

Open any Kalshi market in the Rivo terminal and open its order ticket. The ticket has a Live and Paper switch. Choose Paper, set a side and a size and place the order. You need no Kalshi account and no API key.

1. Search for a Kalshi market in the terminal and open it.
2. Open the ticket on Yes or No.
3. Switch the ticket to Paper. Every ticket opens in Live, and you choose Paper each time.
4. Enter dollars or contracts. The ticket shows the average fill, the fee, the total and the payout before you send.
5. Place the order. The fill lands in your paper portfolio.

The paper ticket runs the same form and the same math as the real Kalshi ticket. What you see on paper is what the live ticket would show for the same order at the same moment.

How does a Kalshi paper order fill?

Five rules cover every paper order:

• The order walks the real book. A buy takes the lowest ask first, then the next, until your size is filled or the book runs out. Big orders pay worse prices, the same as live.
• Kalshi's taker fee applies. The fee is 0.07 x contracts x price x (1 - price), times the series fee multiplier, rounded up to the cent. The fee counts as part of your cost.
• Only what fills now is recorded. If the book holds 150 contracts at your limit and you asked for 400, the paper trade is 150 contracts.
• Nothing rests. A paper limit order trades what crosses on arrival and drops the remainder. Paper mode has no resting orders and no maker fills.
• A sell closes only what you bought on paper. You cannot open a short on paper. A sell reduces a position you placed by hand.

A worked example: $100 of Yes on a live Kalshi market

You want $100 of Yes on a market with a standard fee. The Yes side of the book offers 80 contracts at 42 cents, 120 at 43 cents and 300 at 44 cents. The ticket sizes the order so price plus fee stays inside your $100. This example uses whole contracts.

Three things in this table are worth a second look:

• The top of the book showed 42 cents. Your average was 42.75 cents, because 80 contracts never covers a $100 order.
• The fee took 3.9% of the money you put in. At 42 cents Kalshi's fee sits near its peak, and it shrinks toward the edges of the price range.
• Your break-even is 44.5 cents a contract, not 42. The market has to be right more often than the headline price suggests.

Now you sell 100 of those contracts on paper when the bid reaches 51 cents. The sale pays a fee too.

A 9 cent move on the screen became a 4.8 cent profit a contract after two fees and the walk up the book. The fee formula at every price is in Kalshi fees explained.

What does the paper portfolio show?

Your paper trades live in Portfolio, behind the same Live and Paper switch as the ticket. The Paper side holds:

• Open holdings, marked against the current price of each market.
• Settled holdings, paid at $1 or $0 when the real Kalshi market settles.
• A source on every holding, so you know which ones you placed by hand and which ones a bot recorded.
• Sales you made by hand, each with its realized profit at your average cost.

Paper mode has no cash wallet and no starting balance to run out of. Size your paper trades the way you would size real ones. A paper record at $5,000 a trade tells you nothing about your $50 trades, because the book fills the two very differently.

Can you run a Kalshi bot on paper?

Yes. Rivo has three kinds of bot, and all three run on paper on Kalshi. You build each one in the bot builder.

Copy a Kalshi trader. Pick a trader from the Kalshi leaderboard, set a fixed dollar size or a percentage of each of their trades with a dollar ceiling, and start the bot on paper. The bot answers one question: what would this trader have made me at my size? Your filters, your sizing and your pause switch apply. The builder shows how many trades a week the trader makes and their typical trade size, so you know what a percentage comes to in dollars before you start.

Run a signal. A signal is a set of conditions over incoming Kalshi trades: the kind of market, the trade size, the entry price band, named traders. The builder backtests it on settled markets first, and the paper bot carries the record forward on new trades. The method is on the backtesting page.

Watch a market. A market bot buys when a price drops or jumps by a number of points and sells at a profit target or a stop. Kalshi's 15 minute crypto series suit it well: point the bot at the series and it moves to the market trading now each time one settles. One account runs up to 20 market bots.

The full Kalshi bot walkthrough is on the Kalshi trading bot page, and paper trading a bot before going live covers how many settled trades to wait for.

Kalshi demo vs Rivo paper mode vs live

Plenty of traders use all three. Write your order code against the demo. Run the strategy on paper against the real book. Send real orders once the paper record says what you hoped.

How do you go from paper to live on Kalshi?

Paper is a mode you can stay in as long as you like or skip. When you want real orders, the path is short:

1. Connect your Kalshi API key. Create a key in your Kalshi profile and add it under Connect accounts in Rivo. Orders go through your own Kalshi account. Rivo is not an exchange and holds no funds.
2. Trade by hand first. Leave the ticket on Live. The ticket walks the same book and shows the same fee as your paper tickets did.
3. Take a bot live from its own page. The trader or signal and the size carry over.
4. Set a per-trade limit and a daily limit. The bot never spends past either one.
5. Set a loss limit. New live bots start with one filled in at five times the daily amount. When the bot's own losses reach it, the bot pauses, and you choose whether it also sells its positions.
6. Decide on exits. A live Kalshi trader bot can sell its share when the trader sells.

A live bot checks the price and the book before every order and holds its fill inside your entry price band. Every copy it attempts, including each skip and the reason, is in the bot's log. More on live bots is on the Autopilot page.

What can paper trading not tell you?

Two things, and a trader should know both before sizing up:

• Your paper order does not move the real book. On paper, the 80 contracts at 42 cents are still there after you take them. Live, they are gone, and other traders react to your order. The gap is small at $100 and large at $10,000.
• A paper trader bot records the trader's price. A live bot buys after the trader, at whatever the book offers then. Paper reads better than live would. Treat a paper trader bot as a record of the trader at your size, and expect live fills a little behind it.

The fix for both is the same: start live at a small size and compare the live fills with the paper record.

Paper orders on Kalshi through the API

Developers place the same paper orders from code. Rivo's REST API has POST /v1/paper-orders: a market order named by the market reference of one outcome, filled against the live Kalshi book with Kalshi's fee. It runs on the write scope, because no money moves. The MCP server exposes the same call as the place_paper_order tool, so an AI agent in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can paper trade a live Kalshi market and read the result back.

The split for a developer is clean. Kalshi's demo API tests your own Kalshi client: signing, order fields, cancels, reconnects. Rivo's paper endpoint tests the strategy on top: what the trade costs on the real book, with one bearer key and no signing code.

Frequently asked questions