Terminal Prices and Observation Staleness on Kalshi: A Lifecycle-Anchored Study

A recorded terminal price can be close to a contract's payout while representing an old transaction rather than a contemporaneous market response. We examine this distinction in a fixed, bounded sample of twenty Kalshi markets drawn from a thirty-day lifecycle corpus. Two hundred metadata candidates were selected by hash rank without using prices or payout direction; 180 had both required lifecycle anchors, and twenty were frozen before price retrieval. Subsequent public API requests returned 10,801 distinct non-block trades and 4,067 one-minute candle records. Seventeen markets had transactions in the requested windows; three had none. Every returned trade preceded its market's recorded determination timestamp. Among the seventeen observed markets, the median age of the latest transaction timestamp was 400.71 seconds at determination and 614.78 seconds at settlement. Three markets had different transaction prices at their identical latest timestamps, requiring a set-valued rather than arbitrarily ordered terminal observation. Absolute distances from the subsequently recorded YES payout ranged from $0.001 to $0.12, with both bounds on the cross-market median equal to $0.01. Only 820 candle records combined positive volume with transaction OHLC; the remaining 3,247 contained either a previous-price value or no transaction-price object. We formalize the joint price-age observation and show why moving an unchanged observation to a later lifecycle anchor increases its age without demonstrating new price discovery. These are reproducible, descriptive results for a small terminal-record-conditioned sample, not estimates of causal market response, public contractual decidability, executable arbitrage, or venue-wide convergence.