From News To Moves
Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the NYSE, is bringing prediction markets into the mainstream by merging Wall Street infrastructure with blockchain betting. Here’s your play on trading the future.
By Peter Christensen
Traditional stock markets are pricing expectations about the future. Stocks, bonds, and commodities trade based on what investors think will happen: a company’s share price reflects expected future earnings. Oil futures reflect expected supply and demand. These are indirect bets, though, and because the future could be better or worse than the expectation, there is a wide range of outcomes where you can win or lose.
Prediction markets, on the other hand, don’t trade on expectations. They trade directly on the future. They let people buy and sell shares tied to real-world outcomes: Will the Fed cut rates in December? Will Tesla deliver more than two million cars this year? Each contract represents a probability. If you buy “Trump wins the election” at 60¢ and he does win, you make $1; if not, you lose the 60¢. For years, we’ve traded on what we think will happen. Now, we can trade on whether it happens. It may seem like a subtle difference, but it’s not.
And in October 2025, prediction markets went mainstream. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, announced plans to invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket, valuing the blockchain-based prediction platform at around $8–9 billion. The deal makes ICE the exclusive global distributor of Polymarket’s event-probability data.
The move erases the line between betting and investing as it fuses Wall Street infrastructure with blockchain markets. It affects U.S. investors, crypto venues, data vendors, and even traditional polling firms.
Until now, forecasting has relied on pollsters, pundits, and statistical models. Prediction markets replace those opinions with real money risk. Each trade reveals what participants actually believe, not just what they say, as they put real money behind their words.
And it turns out that money is the most honest opinion. Early studies from platforms like Intrade and PredictIt have shown that these prediction markets often beat poll averages in predicting elections and policy outcomes. By backing Polymarket, ICE is turning those “bets on beliefs” into a formal financial instrument and a continuous, more accurate data feed for institutions.
Instead of asking people what might happen, investors will soon watch probability tickers move like stock quotes as crowds price the future in real time.
Prediction markets have long lived on the edge of legality. They are too close to gambling for regulators and too unstructured for traditional finance. However, when the NYSE owner bets on prediction markets, the rest of Wall Street won’t sit out the hand. Competitors like CME Group and Cboe Global Markets will have to respond with their own offerings.
After oil and gold, the next commodity-of-choice will be what you think happens next. Polymarket’s edge is its data: the aggregated, real-time probabilities its users assign to thousands of events. ICE will package and sell this crowd intelligence as a premium analytics feed for fund managers, media outlets, and corporate forecasters. Just as Bloomberg terminals made trade data a product, ICE will turn human expectation into an asset class, monetizing belief itself.
Washington will not stop people from betting on politics. They will shrug their shoulders at the new practice and tax it. The CFTC has been revisiting its stance on “event contracts,” holding public workshops and issuing provisional guidance. Polymarket’s $112 million acquisition of CFTC-licensed QCX and its clearinghouse gives the sector its first compliant U.S. on-ramp.
That means future-event markets can trade under the same umbrella as futures and options; legally regulated, institutionally cleared, and accessible to mainstream investors. ICE’s involvement all but guarantees that the process will accelerate.
ICE’s $2 billion bet on Polymarket brings prediction markets into the mainstream. By merging Wall Street infrastructure with blockchain betting, it turns public expectation into a tradable asset. The future isn’t just forecast anymore. It’s priced. Below are the four winners we have picked. Click on each ticker to see why we chose it:
ICE’s Polymarket stake legitimizes prediction markets and turns belief into a tradable data stream. The winners aren’t just traders but also the tollbooths, data platforms, and blockchain rails that monetize foresight itself.
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