Venues
Polywhaler watches two prediction markets: Polymarket and Kalshi. Most of the product treats them the same, but a few things differ in ways worth knowing before you trade.
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The original source, and still the deeper one. Trades are on-chain, which is why Polywhaler can show you a wallet address, reconstruct a whale's full history, and reconstruct what a copier could actually have filled at. The market tape is public, so the past is knowable in a way it usually is not.
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A regulated US exchange. Kalshi trades arrive with a trader identity attached rather than a wallet address, so Kalshi whales appear under their display name and avatar.
- Kalshi settles in dollars through the exchange rather than on-chain.
- Connecting it uses an API key rather than a browser wallet. See connecting accounts.
- Historical depth is shallower, so wallet-level statistics that depend on a long history are thinner for Kalshi traders.
Sports is a category, not a venue#
Sports and esports used to be dropped at ingestion. They are now a first-class category, kept out of the default Home view and given their own tab instead. That distinction matters when you read the rest of the product:
- The leaderboard excludes sports by default, so a trader who only trades sports will not appear.
- The Vindicated feed and the daily digest exclude it too.
- Alert rules can opt into it by choosing the sports category explicitly.
Choosing a venue in the product#
In the feed#
Home mixes both. A trade card shows which venue it came from.
In Orca#
A live portfolio is tied to exactly one venue, chosen when you create it. You cannot mix Polymarket and Kalshi positions inside one portfolio. Run two portfolios if you want both.
Copying a Polymarket whale into a Kalshi portfolio means matching their market to the Kalshi equivalent, which is its own problem. See cross-venue matching.
In the API#
GET /v1/trades takes venue, which accepts polymarket, kalshi or all, and sports, which accepts include, exclude or only.
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