Kurush Dubash on Dome's unified prediction market API: arbitrage tools, order routing, and Kalshi vs. Polymarket

Summary

Dome is building a unified API layer for prediction markets, allowing developers and traders to access data and execute trades across multiple platforms — currently Kalshi and Polymarket — from a single integration.

Founder Kurush Dubash (known as Kru) describes a customer base that spans broadly: developers building prediction market skins, copy-trading tools, and agentic trading apps; sportsbooks and hedge funds exploring high-frequency trading; and sweepstakes platforms pricing internal parlays.

The arbitrage angle

Around 80% of contracts on Kalshi and Polymarket cover the same underlying events, creating persistent price gaps that customers are actively exploiting. Dome flags which cross-platform market matches are confirmed 1-to-1 versus approximate — a distinction that matters because markets covering the same event can resolve on different criteria depending on the exchange, a mistake the founders say burned them when they were trading on their own.

Order routing, just launched

Dome's product launched first as a data and pricing layer. As of last week, it has added an order router, starting with on-chain crypto rails. Traditional fiat settlement is planned but not yet live.

Market structure view

Dubash expects the prediction market space to fragment across regions and verticals — sports-only platforms, crypto-focused markets, community-specific exchanges — with Kalshi, Polymarket, and Robinhood (which recently announced plans to operate its own exchange rather than just broker orders) as the large players alongside a long tail of niche venues. The fragmentation is the thesis: more venues mean more fragmented liquidity, and a unified routing and data layer becomes more valuable as the number of platforms grows.

On sportsbooks funding lawsuits against prediction markets while simultaneously building their own prediction market products, Dubash frames it as the taxi industry suing Uber — a rearguard action by incumbents who already see where the market is going.

Infrastructure precedent

Dubash and his co-founder were founding engineers at Alchemy, the blockchain infrastructure layer that underpins much of Web3, including OpenSea and Polymarket. Their read on the NFT comparison: prediction markets will follow the same boom-bust-then-floor-raise pattern. Volume on prediction markets during the first NFL Sunday after the 2024 election exceeded total election-period volume — early evidence the floor has already moved up.

Dome closed a funding round the day before this conversation. No amount was disclosed.