DoubleZero Puts Kalshi Election Order Book on Fiber as Midterm Betting Tops 133 Million USD

Prediction market data is getting the Wall Street treatment. DoubleZero, the high-performance network layer best known in crypto circles, has added real-time order-book data from Kalshi’s election and politics markets to its DoubleZero Edge distribution platform, just as betting activity on the November US midterms surges past every prior election cycle.

The expansion, announced on September 9, adds Kalshi’s election contracts to a feed that already carries data from the prediction market’s sports contracts and its crypto perpetual futures. Subscribers now receive top-of-book pricing, full-depth order-book data and completed trades from Kalshi’s political markets over dedicated fiber, delivered as a single multicast broadcast rather than the request-response model of a public API.

## Election Betting Is Now a Serious Market

The timing is no accident. According to data from the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, wagering on the 2026 US midterms had reached 133 million USD as of August 10, already surpassing the 92.4 million USD bet across the entire 2024 congressional election cycle. At the time of the announcement, a single Kalshi market asking which party will win the US House had recorded more than 35 million USD in trading volume, with Democratic victory odds priced around 84 percent.

That kind of volume attracts professional trading firms, and professional firms compete on speed. Andy Ross, head of institutional at Kalshi, said the integration is intended to make political market data easier to incorporate into institutional workflows as expectations shift around election outcomes.

## Open Access, Not a Private Club

The move has raised an obvious fairness question: if a handful of firms receive the order book milliseconds faster over private fiber, do retail traders on the public internet get a worse deal? DoubleZero co-founder Austin Federa addressed that concern directly in comments to crypto.news, arguing that open access is the answer rather than the problem.

The fastest data path should not be private rails at unreachable price levels, Federa said. By placing Kalshi election market data on DoubleZero rails, anyone, from anywhere, can subscribe to the same stream. Access requires a paid subscription, but there is no sales process or gatekeeping: customers buy the feed through DoubleZero’s website, the subscription is tied to a cryptographic identity and the receiving machine’s internet address, and a single command installs a connector that builds a private tunnel into the network and starts serving data locally as JSON.

Federa also stressed what the product does not do. DoubleZero Edge is a read-only distribution platform with no execution functionality. Participants cannot submit, route or complete trades through the infrastructure. Orders still pass through Kalshi’s own trading systems, leaving DoubleZero as purely a transport layer between the source data and subscribers.

## Why Multicast Changes the Game

Traditional exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and CME publish their data once and broadcast it to all subscribers simultaneously over private fiber, a technique known as multicast. Kalshi’s public API and WebSocket, by contrast, require each firm to maintain its own connection, receive its own copy of the data, and rebuild the order book from separate responses, with delivery times varying by network route.

DoubleZero applies the exchange model to a prediction market for the first time. Data leaves Kalshi through the fastest direct interface available to institutional participants, travels across dedicated fiber, and reaches every subscriber as the same sequenced message at the same time. That removes the duplication work each firm previously handled and ensures a consistent view of the book.

DoubleZero has not yet published latency figures comparing the two approaches. Federa said benchmark data on the delivery layer, including update speed, sequencing consistency and freshness relative to public-internet feeds, will be released during initial product testing. Market-quality metrics like spreads and depth belong to Kalshi, he noted: the company will publish data on delivery, but not venue scorecards.

## A Bigger Debate Over Prediction Markets

The technical upgrade lands in the middle of a legal fight over prediction markets in the United States. Conflicting state and federal court rulings could divide prediction-market access between states, with the core dispute centering on whether federal oversight of designated contract markets prevents states from applying their own gambling laws. Aaron Courtney, chief compliance officer at ProphetX, has warned that the split could leave users in some states with access to federally regulated platforms while users elsewhere face restrictions.

Kalshi itself keeps expanding on the derivatives side. On September 4, the CFTC-regulated exchange added five crypto perpetual futures tied to BNB, Cardano, Worldcoin, Aave and Venice Token, bringing its lineup to Bitcoin plus 17 altcoin contracts. Its event contracts face separate scrutiny: CME Group has challenged the CFTC’s treatment of Kalshi’s Bitcoin perpetual, and the exchange banned former congressman George Santos on August 31 after its compliance department found he had traded both sides of a market about his own attendance at the 2026 State of the Union, earning 17,839 USD before a permanent ban and penalties.

For traders watching the midterms, the message from DoubleZero is simple: the election order book now moves at exchange speed, and the door is technically open to anyone willing to subscribe. Whether that levels the playing field or simply professionalizes it faster will become clear as November approaches.