What settles a Kalshi commodity market: Pyth, and which feed

A field note. The settlement source for each of Kalshi's five fifteen minute commodity markets, from the exchange's own series records, checked on 29 September 2026.

A binary on the price of oil at the end of a fifteen minute window needs a referee. Kalshi names one per series, and the API tells you which:

GET /trade-api/v2/series/KXWTI15M

The settlement_sources field points at a Pyth Network feed. All five commodity series settle the same way:

Crypto is different. The Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana series list CF Benchmarks, whose real time index is the number those markets settle on.

Three things that follow

The index feeds are not the spot feeds. Pyth publishes a plain Metal.XAU/USD for gold and a separate Metal.Index.1OZGOLD/USD. Kalshi uses the second. They track each other closely, but they are different feeds with different ids, and a strategy that watches the first is watching an approximation of its own referee. When we tried Pyth's API on a trial key it served the plain spot symbols and returned not entitled on all five index feeds. Access to the exact settlement numbers is a separate entitlement, and worth asking for by feed before building anything on it.

There is no strike in the ticker. A commodity fifteen minute ticker carries a date and a time and nothing else, because the price to beat is the feed's print at the window's open. The market asks whether the referee's number at the close is above its number at the open. Any model of these markets has to start from the opening print, not from a level.

Fees are the ordinary quadratic schedule. Makers quote free and takers pay. That matters because these books are thin, and the cost of crossing them is most of what an edge has to clear. We measured a three to six cent edge across all five series and collected it in one. That study is here.

Kalshi records how each series settles. Read the series endpoint rather than assuming, and read it again after any rule change. The exchange added maker fees to about 130 series in July with very little notice, and that list is here.