DoubleZero co-founder Austin Federa has defended the company's decision to provide open access to Kalshi's faster election-market data feed while confirming that the infrastructure remains read-only and provides no way to submit or execute trades. According to Federa's statement to crypto.news, professional traders tend to compete on speed with each other, while tighter competition between market makers can produce narrower spreads and better prices for other participants. The service distributes Kalshi's full election order book, including bids, offers and completed trades, over a dedicated fiber network. Federa emphasized that "Traditional markets figured out a long time ago that if the data is late, the trade is dead. Prediction markets are starting to matter the same way, especially around elections."
DoubleZero announced on September 9 that Kalshi's election and politics markets had become available through DoubleZero Edge ahead of the U.S. election season. The service uses dedicated fiber and multicast to replace the public-internet delivery used by Kalshi's API and WebSocket. As reported by PRNewswire, DoubleZero Edge provides complete market data delivered over the lowest latency path available, designed for AI and automated trading systems. An MCP server extends this capability to onboarding, whereby an agent can discover available feeds, request a connection, and troubleshoot it without manual intervention. Subscribers can choose between top-of-book data containing the best available bid and offer, and full-depth data containing every price level. Access requires a paid subscription through DoubleZero's website, with the software configuring the receiving machine and creating a private tunnel into DoubleZero's network.
According to Federa's statement, DoubleZero will track how quickly updates move from source to subscribers, how consistently users receive the same sequenced order book, and how fresh the delivered information remains compared with public-internet feeds. The company will publish transport benchmarks but will leave market-quality reporting to Kalshi. Federa emphasized that DoubleZero will not use Kalshi's spread or depth figures as performance measures for Edge, separating transport measures from spreads and price behavior during major political events. Kalshi operates as a Commodity Futures Trading Commission-regulated designated contract market, with its dollar-margined perpetuals giving U.S. traders long or short price exposure without requiring them to hold the underlying tokens. However, as reported by crypto.news, Kalshi faces an uneven legal environment across the United States, with conflicting state court rulings potentially dividing prediction-market access and liquidity between states.
Prediction market activity around the 2026 U.S. midterm elections has already surpassed the entire 2024 congressional cycle, with more than $133 million traded on House and Senate races across major platforms as of mid-August. According to PRNewswire, with the midterms on November 3rd, the expansion arrives as election-driven volume continues to climb and institutions increasingly use prediction markets as a source of real-time information about political and economic outcomes. Kalshi has conducted more than 150 investigations in the first quarter of 2026, blocked over 100 suspected insider-trading attempts and referred 20 cases to law enforcement. The election feed includes Level 1 data (Top of Book and Trades) and Level 2 Depth of Book data aggregated by price, covering Kalshi's election contracts and delivered over a single connection on DoubleZero's fiber network.
Recent additions to Kalshi's product lineup include five crypto perpetuals tied to BNB, Cardano, Worldcoin, Aave, and Venice Token, increasing its lineup to Bitcoin and 17 altcoin perpetual contracts. The exchange has also expanded into event contracts, including a ban on George Santos after compliance found he traded contracts based on whether he would attend President Donald Trump's 2026 State of the Union address, earning $17,839.57 and receiving a $71,356 penalty. As reported by PRNewswire, Kalshi is credited with legalizing and establishing prediction markets as a financial asset class, serving as the leading safe and regulated platform, trusted by millions of people and a growing number of institutions in America. Andy Ross, Head of Institutional at Kalshi, noted that "Election markets give institutions a real-time, tradable view into how expectations shift as political events unfold." He emphasized that easier integration of Kalshi's political market data into institutional workflows provides firms another tool to price risk, manage exposure and adjust positions as expectations change.
