Imagine a tool where you can place an order in less time than it takes you to roast us why you can’t do that easily already.

The wait is over. (Or at least for a couple days until you find a new tool that needs enhancing).

Enter: The Kalshi Developer Suite

Supercharging the Developer Suite

About a year ago, the Kalshi team sat down to discuss what we saw as the most important building blocks for the future of Event Trading. We debated a variety of projects, from ranged market structures, to market powered forecasting, and hedging products that we thought would help bring the value of prediction markets to the broader world. One project that came up again and again was APIs: what would the future of development tools for Event Contracts look like?

And so we began discussing this with you all. Whether it be through Discord roasts, thorough emails or incisive sub-tweets, your feedback was instrumental in shaping these tools to the needs of the space. And that’s why today we’re so excited to announce the release of the Kalshi Developer Suite.

1. Live Data Streams

In case you weren’t already aware, there has been a barrage of requests for more real time orderbook data… and rightly so. The only thing worse than trading on stale data is to navigate API authentication without a code sample (more on that later).

Previously, order book data required the REST API to be polled repeatedly, over… and over… and over. Even then, it was not guaranteed to be fresh :(. We needed a solution that not only would provide insanely low latency, but would do so concurrently for many markets all at once.

Starting today, you can say goodbye to those repeated GET requests, and hello to HTTPS handshakes: orderbook and price data streaming is now live at wss:trading-api/v1/ws. Via the new Websocket client, simply subscribe to a market’s orderbook channel and receive the real time data needed to make real time trading decisions. You don’t need to ping us anymore, we’ll bother you continuously…

2. Developer Simplicity

Algo Trading doesn’t discriminate between coding languages, and now our API documentation doesn’t either. You can integrate the API easily using any coding language using services provided by readme (we are huge fans of yours @readme!)

Even if you learned to code in the 1980s and can’t help but use Objective-C, authenticating your API connection will take only a matter of seconds. Toggle between different languages, initiate requests via the “Try It button” and paste your favorite code snippets right into production.

While the REST v2 contains fewer endpoints than the v1, each feature is more powerful and more flexible than before. You will find a whole new suite of functional query params, required buy/sell order specification and a new pagination schema to ensure that you never ever drop trade data while loading that HIGHCHI arbitrage strategy backtest.

3. Streamlined market identification… using Tickers!

Back in March of this year, we introduced Market Tickers to help you track repeated markets. Now you can look up market information just from the ticker (found at the top of every market page!)

4. Access Kalshi’s event infrastructure more easily 

Jump right into an event before you even know which strike to trade on. The new “GetEvent” endpoint returns information about the mutual exclusivity of the event, what series it belongs to, and all the relevant market metadata you need to build those up to the minute forecasts.

5. Paper Trading on Demo, Advanced API Access and Slack Accessibility

Not ready to deploy into production just yet? All tools in the developer suite are available on Demo and transfer seamlessly into live trading with a few changes to your request path.

https://demo.kalshi.com/trade-api/v2/ -> https://trading-api.kalshi.com/trade-api/v2/.

Looking to deploy strategies that need higher rate limits? Apply for advanced API access and while you’re at it, feel free to join our slack channel to get direct access to the team!

Forecasting has Never Been Brighter

We hope that these new tools enable better algorithmic trading experiences, power a variety of real time forecasts, and much more. We believe this is but the first inning of Event Trading, and that the trading opportunities are near endless.

Here are some links to help you get trading:

• API Documentation and Pypi Library [Buttons: API Documentation, Pypi Library]

• Kalshi Developer Set Up Sessions [Button: Register for Kalshi Developer Sessions]

• Visit our Learn page to find out more about Event Trading

Plus…we’ll give the best developer $1,000

The future of Kalshi’s development tools will be guided by the community that uses them. That’s why we’re launching a Hackathon to jumpstart the development process using the new tools released today – the developer(s) of the best public trading tool using the new API will receive $1,000 in Kalshi credit. Learn more or sign up now here.

We believe this suite of new tools is remarkably powerful, and we are very excited to watch you all try them out. As always, your feedback is at the center of our mission to grow the world of Event Trading, so please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions, comments or requests for features.

Happy Coding!

The Kalshi team

P.S. Keep an eye out for a second announcement highlighting updates about our FIX API, Market Structure Variable Fields and some other features still to come.

REST API v1 will continue to be supported through December 31st, 2022.