Aggregating Fragmented Prediction Markets
Kurush Dubash, CEO of Dome, on unified API for prediction markets
The strategic bottleneck in prediction markets is not demand, it is that the same event lives inside separate, non portable venues. A trader can hold Bitcoin in a wallet and send it between exchanges, or move cash and shares through brokerage plumbing, but a Kalshi contract and a Polymarket contract are different instruments with different custody, settlement, and platform rules even when both ask the same yes or no question. That is why market matching and order routing matter so much here.
-
Kalshi and Polymarket look similar to users, but the plumbing is very different. Kalshi runs a regulated, closed system with fiat rails and a clearinghouse. Polymarket writes trades onchain and settles through crypto rails. That makes direct portability hard, because there is no shared account system or settlement layer between them.
-
This fragmentation matters because the overlap is large. Dome describes roughly 80% of markets across platforms as the same underlying event, yet liquidity is split into separate books. An aggregator can map those books together, show one combined depth view, and route each order to the venue with the best price instead of forcing users to check each app manually.
-
The closest analogue is not moving coins between wallets, but sportsbook line shopping. In sportsbooks and equities, intermediaries already compare venues and route orders. Prediction markets are only starting to get that layer. As the category grows, platforms are increasingly trying to become the liquidity engine beneath other apps, which raises the value of open APIs and aggregation tools.
Over the next few years, the winners in prediction markets are likely to be the venues and middleware that make fragmented contracts feel like one market. As more brokers, sportsbooks, and crypto apps plug in, portability will matter less at the contract level and more at the routing layer, where the product that controls discovery, matching, and execution becomes the default gateway to liquidity.