NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange to invest $2 billion in betting platform Polymarket

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced on Tuesday that it plans to invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket. This investment aims to support the New York Stock Exchange parent company's efforts to diversify beyond its traditional trading activities, especially as there is increasing interest in prediction markets.

Polymarket, which allows users to profit from predicting outcomes across topics including sports, entertainment, politics and the economy, has been valued at around $8 billion pre-investment, ICE said in a statement on Tuesday.

In addition to its investment, ICE will serve as a global distributor of Polymarket’s event-driven data, offering clients sentiment indicators on key market topics. Furthermore, ICE and Polymarket have mutually agreed to collaborate on future tokenisation projects.

“There are opportunities across markets which ICE together with Polymarket can uniquely serve, and we are excited about where this investment can take us,” ICE Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Sprecher said in the statement.

“Together, we’re expanding how individuals and institutions use probabilities to understand and price the future,” Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan said.

“Realising the potential of new technologies, such as tokenisation, will require collaboration between established market leaders and next-generation innovators,” he added.

Growing interest in prediction markets

Interest in prediction markets surged during the 2024 US presidential election, with platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi managing billions of dollars in bets on the outcome.

Polymarket went offshore by federal regulators in 2022; however, it reached an agreement to come back after acquiring a lesser-known derivatives exchange named QCX earlier this year. This acquisition occurred just weeks after prosecutors ended an investigation into the company, which had also added Donald Trump Jr. to its advisory board earlier this year.

The probes assessed whether Polymarket, under CEO Shayne Coplan, kept allowing US traders on its platform despite a 2022 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in which it agreed to block them due to a lack of registration, Bloomberg reported.