New York, October 2025 — Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, announced plans to invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket, a blockchain-based prediction platform, marking a pivotal moment in the institutional adoption of event-driven trading.
The deal, which values Polymarket at roughly $8 billion, will make ICE the company’s largest strategic partner and global distributor of its prediction market data. ICE executives said the investment aims to “bridge traditional financial infrastructure with decentralized forecasting models,” signaling the group’s intention to dominate the emerging space where betting, analytics, and finance converge.
Polymarket, founded in 2020, allows users to trade on the outcomes of real-world events — from elections and economic reports to sports and climate predictions — using blockchain technology for transparency. Despite early regulatory friction with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which fined Polymarket $1.4 million in 2022 for operating an unregistered exchange, the platform has since worked to align with U.S. compliance standards.
In July 2025, Polymarket acquired QCX, a Florida-based derivatives exchange, and its clearinghouse QC Clearing for $112 million, paving the way for its legal reentry into the American market. ICE clarified that the investment will have no material effect on 2025 earnings, but analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence suggest it positions the exchange group as an early leader in the tokenization of financial data and prediction markets — a segment projected to exceed $50 billion in global volume by 2030.
Following the announcement, ICE shares rose 4.3% in pre-market trading, reflecting investor optimism about the diversification of the NYSE owner’s digital strategy. With this move, ICE is effectively betting on the future of financial prediction as an asset class — and on Polymarket as the bridge between Wall Street and Web3.
