Intercontinental Exchange To Invest Up To $2 Bln In Crypto Prediction Platform Polymarket

(RTTNews) - The New York Stock Exchange's parent company, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), has revealed plans to invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket, a cryptocurrency based prediction market that lets users place bets on actual events like elections and sporting events.

With the all-cash deal, Polymarket has a pre-investment valuation of roughly $8 billion, and ICE will become a global distributor of the event-driven data from the platform.

The two businesses also intend to work together on upcoming tokenization projects. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan stated, "Together, we're expanding how individuals and institutions use probabilities to understand and price the future." Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of ICE, described the agreement as "an opportunity to uniquely serve markets together."

After Polymarket settled charges with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for running an unregistered exchange, the company was forced offshore in 2022.

However, the company recently made a comeback to the U.S. market by paying $112 million to acquire the Florida based derivatives exchange QCX and its affiliated clearinghouse, QC Clearing.

With billions of bets, the platform's popularity skyrocketed during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. A significant step toward integrating prediction markets into the financial mainstream, according to Coplan, is the company's collaboration with ICE.

Since the Trump administration's changing political views have improved the regulatory climate for prediction markets, competitors like Kalshi Inc. and Crypto.com have also branched out into sports related contracts.