Independent outage monitor for prediction markets

What to build

A third-party status and incident monitoring bot for prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi that polls each platform's API/on-chain data for outages, vendor API failures, and settlement anomalies, then pushes real-time alerts to traders via Telegram or Discord so they don't have to trust the platform's own status page during an incident.

Polymarket's vendor-compromise halt exposed that traders have no independent way to verify platform status or settlement integrity mid-incident, creating an opening for a neutral third-party monitor.

Demand

Active prediction-market traders with open positions during an outage want independent confirmation that a halt isn't masking settlement errors affecting them, since the platform itself is the only source and is distrusted exactly when it matters most.

• Hacker NewsNews

  Thread on the Polymarket trading halt and vendor compromise reached 107 points and 41 comments — high engagement for a single resolved incident.

• Polymarket (platform statement/status page)Statement

  Polymarket halted trading for approximately 1 hour following a reported vendor compromise and stated that affected users would be made whole.

• Signal aggregation (tech signal feed)News

  Secondary reporting/aggregation of the Polymarket halt event, categorized as a tech-sector signal with global region tagging and no historical precedent match.

Stack

• Polymarket public API / subgraph
• Kalshi API
• Telegram Bot API
• Discord webhooks
• Node.js cron worker
• Supabase (incident log + status history)

Solo + AI difficulty

Polling public market APIs and firing Telegram/Discord alerts on downtime is an easy weekend build with AI-assisted coding; the hard part is defining and detecting 'settlement anomaly' logic reliably without false positives, and platforms may rate-limit or block heavy polling. Rough MVP (uptime + outage alerts only) is about 1-2 weeks; anomaly detection adds meaningfully more time.

Entry threshold

A solo builder can scrape public status pages, on-chain settlement data, and social signals (Twitter/X, Discord) to build an alerting bot within days; no licences needed, though reliable uptime requires redundant monitoring infrastructure.

Window

1-3 months

Where to find first users

• r/Polymarket and r/predictionmarkets
• Prediction-market trader Discord/Telegram communities
• Crypto/prediction-market Twitter (X)
• Product Hunt launch

Counter-signals & risks

• A single, resolved 1-hour incident with a compensation commitment may indicate the platform's existing vendor-risk and incident-response processes are adequate, reducing perceived demand for third-party monitoring tooling.

• Prediction market platforms (Polymarket, Kalshi) may resist or block third-party tools that scrape/monitor their status and settlement data, limiting the feasibility of real-time independent verification.

• Low historical match ('none') and modest score (0.47) suggest this is an isolated event rather than a recurring pattern, weakening the case for sustained trader demand for an independent monitoring/alerting product.