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

markets. So, we'll bring in the founder of Dome. Welcome to the show. What's going on? Welcome to the TBP and Ultradome. You're in the Ultradome and Company's Dome. Uh, please introduce yourself and your company. What do you do?

Hi, my name is Kru. We're basically Dome. So, Dome is a unified API for prediction markets. In a nutshell, what that means is we allow users and developers to trade an analyze across multiple platforms at once.

Okay. Who's the customer? Are you talking hedge funds or like the most advanced traders?

Yeah, honestly, it's it's all of the above. A lot of our current customers are are folks building applications in prediction markets. So these are folks building like prediction market skins or markets themselves or copy trading and agentic trading is like really popular right now. Uh we talked to a lot of sports books and hedge funds as well. They're they're getting interested in high frequency trading and also like platforms like you know things sweepstakes apps folks who are trying to like price internal parlays. So there's a lot of applications currently being built right now.

It's crazy. Uh very cool. Uh who's your favorite Poly Market or Koshi?

I'm [laughter] just kidding. I'm just kidding. I won't make you I won't make you answer that.

I was about to say that's the million dollar question.

Yeah. Yeah. No, no. I mean, it's uh it's unfort, you know, it's unfortunate that the timeline is just so incredibly uh toxic right now, but I feel like you're able to kind of like sit back and be hopefully like Switzerland and support a variety of different uh exchanges. How do you think this market actually shapes out? Right. Uh I think the big news from last week is that Robin Hood is uh getting into the game themselves. they actually want to not just be a broker, they want to be the exchange. But how does this how does this evolve?

Yeah, I mean we we're supporting currently Poly Market and Koshi. They're both great. Obviously, we don't we don't pick a winner in the fight. We want everyone to do well. Um and what we're currently seeing is there are a bunch of new platforms launching different regions, different specific verticals. Some folks are just like only sports, some are doing crypto mention markets. So what we're actually seeing is there's going to be a lot of players coming in each trying to find their specific wedge, find their little market, their community there. And so in addition, you have Kowi Poly Market, you'll have Robin Hood and a bunch of other big players that are are probably launching soon, but you'll also have a lot of these like smaller players in different specific regions and verticals. And so we're excited to see like the whole world basically start adopting this. Do you have a do you have a a reference point for how crossmarket uh transactions like like is there is there a public markets equivalent to you or or some sort of uh like like layer that's not necessarily a hedge fund but like like I I remember reading flash boys and in there they're talking about trading on the commodity markets in Chicago and then also the stock exchanges in New York and but it's done this is all done by the hedge funds. there's not some sort of intermediary. Why do we need an intermediary here in this markets particularly?

Yeah, I mean it's a great question for what it's flash is my co-founder's favorite book hit it on the nail but yeah absolutely. So one as you get a lot more providers in right now a lot of the liquidity is fragmented. So if you actually look at just calcium and poly market themselves about like 80% of their markets their underlying contracts are the same event.

So you actually have a good amount of overlap there. But you also hit it on the nail as well is like there are other markets you can match against like sports books are obviously very very clear. There's a lot of prediction market overlap there. Crypto prices per and all these things. So by kind of taking all this data in creating creating that centralized source it really helps out the hedge funds and those other professional traders who are trying to trade across multiple platforms because everything's in one spot. Are is some of your volume people just arbing markets on the different predict you know basically seeing like okay what are the odds on Kshi what are the odds on poly market and trying to find alpha through that

yeah I mean arbitrage is a very like common request from a lot of our customers right I we actually had a customer that like charted using our APIs like the different prices across the platforms and it's a really cool visual because you can see the gaps over time of like free arbitrage and so arbitrage is a very common platform u one thing that we do really well is we make sure like when we're matching markets across platforms, we tell them like, "Hey, this is for sure one:1 market versus like a maybe one:1 market because personally the way we got started was we were trading ourselves and and got burned as well when when two markets look similar but they're not perfectly similar and you lose a lot of money." And so that's something you think your head think you're squeezing%. Here's the here's the issue is you can have the same event but then like different criteria in the market based on the platform and where what exchange it's hosted on. Um, a lot of people have been seeing the rounds coming together for the different uh prediction market platforms and and uh having flashbacks to like open C uh in 2021 and 2022. Why do you think NFTTS which also saw explosive growth and volume are are are kind of not the right comp for uh this industry?

Yeah, great question. Uh biggest answer is like we've kind of seen this exact playbook before. Both my co-founder and I, we were founding engineers at a company called Alchemy.

So they're the blockchain infrastructure layer for anything you're doing in web 3. Uh they did extraordinarily well and prior to them really like the only really big businesses in crypto was exchanges. after they came and solved the infrastructure problem. You saw a bunch of companies build on top of them, including OpenC and Poly Market. So, we've seen this wave, we've built a lot of like the similar technology, the infrastructure layer at these previous companies. What you typically see is like there's a huge hype and boom cycle. Everyone's excited and then like interest kind of fades away, but people keep building and then the next hype cycle you realize, wow, the floors raise. And so with with prediction markets, you saw this during the 2024 election. Everyone was super excited. They thought this was the future. the election ended, everyone's like, "Oh, this is fine. We'll see you in 2028." But that but they people kept building. And then the first week of the NFL Sunday, they did more volume than they did during the 2024 election. And so that's just more proof to say like yes, there will be boom and bust as far as interest, but the overall market will continue to grow. uh are you actually routing trades on behalf of uh on behalf of clients or just providing the data layer because I imagine it could get uh quite difficult when some exchanges are using digital asset you know stable coins others are using traditional fiat rails I'm sure you would need to integrate both um what can you say there

yeah so first things we start off with is you got to solve the read layer you got to give developers the tools they need to build Right? So that was the first version of product is just give them data, give them prices, APIs, tools, whatever they need to display on their applications so that they can build applications. Right? The next part of our plan was then okay, let's actually start doing order routing and and routing these requests to these different platforms. And we actually just recently launched our order router as of last week. And so we will be doing we first are starting off on the crypto angle like processing orders through uh onchain portions and then eventually we'll also do off-chain and and traditional fiat as well. Uh do you think it's interesting that a lot of the sports books are uh funding lawsuits against the prediction markets while also starting prediction markets uh products themselves?

I think it's super interesting. I think I think a lot of these sports books and sports companies are also very smart and aware. They understand they kind of see the writing on the wall. There's so many more advantages to having a pure prediction market, a P2B experience. It's a lot better for the end consumer as well. So I think they they they kind of see the writing on the wall. I think while the the lawsuits are like the equivalent of like maybe the taxi industry suing Uber back in the day, I think eventually most of this industry will move towards prediction markets.

Uh how's the round going?

Round's been good. We actually closed up yesterday and so super super excited. We're we're excited to get back to building.

I had a feeling. I had a feeling.

I appreciate that. Yeah, I appreciate the excitement. It's been it's been an exciting journey so far.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, great to meet you.

Congratulations. Appreciate you guys having fun.

Celebrating domes. Yes, we appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.

Have a good one. Uh before bringing our next guest, let me tell you about none other than Turbo Puffer Serverless Vector and Fault Search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable. Um the Forbes 30 under 30 came out today. Uh, and liquidity is having some fun because one of the guys who made it, he performed 150% equity growth since 2019, but the S&P is up over 172% over the same period.

So, seems

he made money for his investors.

Well, yeah, this is the thing. He might have taken less risk. And so, if he took less risk and made almost the same amount of money, then that's good, you know. So, there is a steel man for this particular person making the 4. Man,

but there's some there's some good folks on the 30 under 30. We'll have to take you through them at some point, but