Kalshi puts its order book on multicast fibre, and waives its cut to get it used

Kalshi has made its live order book available for the first time over DoubleZero Edge, a low-latency data service that moves exchange and blockchain feeds to trading firms over dedicated fibre ^[1][4]. That makes the event-contract exchange the first prediction market on the network and, according to Crowdfund Insider, only the second venue of any type on it, after Solana ^[2].

The delivery model is the point. Edge uses multicast: the data is published once at the source and arrives simultaneously at every connected subscriber ^[5]. NYSE, Nasdaq and CME have used comparable methods for years to get reliable, low-jitter delivery ^[6]. There is nothing novel here in engineering terms, which is exactly why it matters. Kalshi is not inventing a distribution channel; it is adopting the one professional participants already build against, and this is the first time its market data has gone out over a multicast network at all ^[3].

Subscribers get Level 1, meaning top-of-book prices plus executed trades, and Level 2, the full depth of the book at every price level ^[8]. The feed is normalized and machine-readable, which removes the work of rebuilding books from public APIs, normalizing Yes/No quotes, and managing stream and request limits ^[9]. Firms that wanted a production-grade view of Kalshi previously assembled that infrastructure themselves ^[10]. The initial coverage is the two most liquid categories: sports event contracts and crypto perpetual futures ^[7].

Note what is not included. Edge carries market data only and does not touch order execution [c11a]. Historical data is planned for a later release [c11b], so any firm that wants to backtest against this feed still has to capture and store its own ticks in the meantime ^[2].

The commercial detail is the most revealing line in the announcement. Kalshi is forgoing its usual share of subscription revenue for the first year, so pricing reflects network delivery cost rather than data licensing ^[15]. Exact pricing is on request [c15b]. An exchange that believed its data was scarce would charge for it. An exchange that wants sophisticated flow in the book treats data as distribution and eats the licence fee, which is the trade Kalshi has chosen for at least twelve months.

The stated rationale matches. Andy Ross, Kalshi's Head of Institutional, said the platform increasingly hosts the same sophisticated firms active in conventional markets, and that those firms expect consistent infrastructure across every venue they trade ^[14]. Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero, framed it from the other side: traditional finance identified data access as core market structure long ago, and large firms built private high-speed networks for their own use, while crypto, perpetual futures and prediction markets lacked the equivalent ^[12][13]. The feed is powered by Kalshi Research and is available to Edge subscribers now ^[16]. Kalshi was founded in 2018 and runs a regulated event-contract exchange spanning economics, politics, sports, culture and crypto ^[17].

Watch three things. Whether the revenue share returns in year two, and at what number, which will tell you how much of this feed is genuinely being paid for. When historical data ships, since backtesting is the gate for most systematic strategies. And whether Edge adds a third venue: with two names on the network so far ^[1], the value of a single normalized transport layer depends entirely on how many venues sit behind it.