Outcome Determination and Settlement Finality on Kalshi: Public State Paths, Prospective Measurement, and Empirical Identification

Abstract

Event-contract settlement is a state path rather than a universal timestamp. Using a registered seven-day enrollment and seven-day administrative follow-up on Kalshi, this paper distinguishes market-object membership, lifecycle messages, endpoint states, and observation gaps. The MVE layer contains 7,611,594 tickers created inside the registered half-open interval; the reconstructed ordinary stock contains 152,694 markets at risk at the enrollment boundary, 3,477,227 already terminal records, and 11,410 boundary-uncertain records. The follow-up identifies exact public endpoints for 7,357,576 MVE market objects: 7,237,993 through REST settlement time alone, 119,212 agreeing across WebSocket and REST, and 371 WebSocket-only; 254,018 lack an admissible exact endpoint. In the ordinary boundary cohort, 71,657 markets have an exact WebSocket endpoint and 81,037 do not. These are venue-level public-finality outcomes, not member-cash observations. Exact determination-to-endpoint pairs are available for 126,806 MVE and 70,979 ordinary tickers, with respective mean durations of 9.676 and 322.50 seconds and observed maxima of 15 and 7,133 seconds. The contrast is descriptive, not causal. Transport gaps preserve two exact endpoint clocks but prevent the same rows from proving complete intermediate paths or absence of revisions; current settlement timers cannot be bound to historical rule versions. Public endpoint completion is therefore extensive, especially on REST, while path completeness remains narrower and family-specific. The exact-key historical crosswalk records earlier interim observations without changing the final cohort or endpoint facts.