One market, every venue: how W.E.T. standardizes prediction markets

Why prediction markets fragment

Section 5c(c) of the Commodity Exchange Act lets each regulated venue self-certify its own event contracts. That built an explosive market — and a fragmented one. Kalshi, Polymarket, and every venue that follows list their own contracts on the same real-world events, with different wording, prices, fees, liquidity, rules, and resolution sources, and no required consolidated tape connecting them. The same question about the world trades in silos at inconsistent prices.

No exchange can fix this: indexing a rival's listings is off-strategy for a venue, and a venue-run benchmark of its own contracts could never be independent. A neutral, cross-venue organizer has to sit above the order books. That is the layer W.E.T. builds — exchange-agnostic, indexing every CFTC-regulated venue on the same terms.

The canonical event graph

Standardization starts with identity: which venue listings actually refer to the same real-world market? Two contracts are treated as equivalent only when their outcome definition, observation window, threshold, resolution source, and material edge cases sufficiently align. Similar wording is not enough — two "Fed cuts in March" contracts that settle on different announcements are different markets.

The graph also records how non-identical markets relate: one contract can be a submarket of another, the inverse of it, conditional on it, or share a catalyst with it. Every mapping carries a confidence score and an audit state, and low-confidence automated matches never enter benchmark calculations without approval — a wrong mapping would contaminate everything downstream.

One number per market

Once listings are mapped to a canonical market, W.E.T. derives a single cross-venue probability. Each venue's price is read under a published rule (executable midpoints, freshness checks, fee adjustments where applicable), and the venues are combined in log-odds space — not naively averaged — weighted by liquidity and depth, freshness, venue reliability, and mapping confidence. The result is one canonical read per market, with every input observation retained and dated.

A hard rule sits under all of it: commercial relationships never affect the weights. Affiliate economics never reorder a board, weight an index, or hide a better price at a rival venue. Methodology changes go through published governance, not a growth meeting.

Divergence is preserved, not hidden

When venues disagree, W.E.T. does not bury the disagreement inside the aggregate. Cross-venue divergence is measured and published separately — it lowers confidence in the canonical reading, and it is often a signal in its own right. The live board of the widest gaps is at Kalshi vs Polymarket. Divergence does not automatically mean arbitrage or edge.

What standardization enables

The canonical layer is the foundation everything else stands on: the WET Indexes that combine related markets into measurable, competing views of the future; the World Event Dashboard that makes the whole board navigable; the Worldview Portfolios users build from those indexes; and the historical archive and index API that make the record citable. How the published odds themselves are computed and dated is documented in the methodology.

Everything on this page describes data reporting, not advice. Values are free to quote with attribution to W.E.T. (World Event Trading).