Original author: shushu
The battle between Musk and Trump to kill the one he loves first continues.
A few days ago, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan announced that Polymarket has become the official prediction market partner of social media giant X and its artificial intelligence team xAI. The cooperation combines the data of the X platform with the analytical capabilities of Grok to provide millions of Polymarket users around the world with more contextual and data-backed insights in real time.
Currently, Grok is already using Polymarket’s data to predict uncertain real-world events, but it’s not clear how this partnership will change the experience for X users.
The announcement of this cooperation happened just one day after Musk and Trump had a public confrontation on social media. Just two weeks ago, X platform had contacted Kalshi for similar cooperation matters. It is worth noting that Trumps eldest son Donald Trump Jr. is Kalshis senior adviser.
Considering Kalshi’s connection with the Trump family, this cooperation not only has product-level significance, but is also interpreted as another in-depth test by Musk in reconstructing political relations, expanding financial infrastructure, and promoting the vision of super applications.
According to a press release from Polymarket, the two parties will launch a series of jointly developed integrated features and unique experiences.
The content of the agreement shows that X will provide data-driven insights to Polymarket, and Polymarkets prediction results will be fed back to the X platform, combined with real-time interpretation from Grok and related X posts, to achieve explainable predictive data flow.
Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, said the partnership will bring more value to X users who already use Polymarket: Polymarket has become an important source of real-time information for many X users by providing extreme transparency through its prediction markets. We are excited to work with Polymarket and bring our data and technology to their users through a series of innovative product integrations.
Currently, Polymarket’s monthly trading volume has gradually increased after the election.
Why Polymarket?
Although Polymarket is one of the most popular prediction market platforms, it is still banned in the United States. In January 2022, the CFTC determined that it illegally operated an unregistered trading platform and fined it $1.4 million.
At that time, Vincent McGonagle, acting director of the CFTC’s enforcement division, said: “Market participants (such as Polymarket) should proactively communicate with regulators to ensure that the market remains sound, transparent, and provides customers with protection under the Commodity Exchange Act and related regulations.” The CFTC also sent a “cease and desist” letter to Polymarket, making it unable to legally operate in the US market. This also makes the cooperation between X and Polymarket particularly eye-catching - especially considering that Kalshi is currently approved to legally operate prediction markets in the United States.
The rift continues
Musks current conflict with Trump is obviously difficult to separate from this new cooperation. As mentioned earlier, Trumps eldest son Donald Trump Jr. is a senior advisor to Kalshi, and the platform has previously discussed similar cooperation with X.
Although such large-scale collaborations are usually not finalized in a day or two, Kalshi’s potential collaboration with X was indeed “officially announced-cancelled” within a day.
In May this year, Bloomberg reported that Kalshi and xAI were in talks to collaborate, including using xAI’s capabilities to provide Kalshi with “customized AI insights.” At the time, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said on social media: “I am very excited to announce that Kalshi will soon collaborate with xAI to accelerate the prediction market towards the mainstream.”
But this joy was short-lived, the relevant statement was deleted on the same day, and there has been no follow-up to date.
This makes Xs decisive move to Polymarket, which has not yet obtained US compliance license, full of symbolic meaning in the context of public opinion and politics. In this context, why did Musk choose to cooperate with Polymarket in an illegal state?
In the short term, this may just be a counterattack against Kalshis turn to Trump; in the long term, this may be a step for Musk to challenge the existing regulatory paradigm and build a borderless financial tool for X. He obviously does not want his super application path to be clamped by the rhythm of traditional financial compliance.
X’s financial ambitions: from payment systems to prediction markets
In fact, X has a long history with financial services. As early as 1999, Musk founded X.com, trying to build an online hub for global financial transactions. Later, the company merged with Peter Thiels Confinity to give birth to PayPal. Although Musk was kicked out of the board of directors and PayPal eventually became the main brand, he never gave up the concept of X. In 2017, he bought back the X.com domain name from PayPal, calling it emotional value. Five years later, he acquired Twitter and integrated it into X Corp to restart his former vision.
If you just want to be a niche payment system, PayPal is more suitable; but if you want to take over the global financial system, you have to use X. This is what Musk left in Musk Biography. He has never concealed his ambition to make X into Western WeChat - a super platform integrating social, payment, content, information and identity.
Predicting the market is a new piece of the puzzle for X to move towards this goal. Polymarkets data structure and user behavior are highly complementary to Xs real-time public opinion, AI analysis engine Grok, and the XPay payment system that may be launched in the future. Musk obviously hopes that after incorporating Polymarket into the ecosystem, he can capture social trends, public opinion tendencies, and even market sentiment from user-generated data, and form commercializable and actionable financial products.
The press release clearly states that Polymarket’s prediction results will be combined with Grok AI’s semantic understanding capabilities to generate “interpretable prediction data streams” to provide X users with data insights with real-time context. This provides a practical example for the long-term narrative of “AI × Finance × Social”.
At the same time, X is also accelerating its expansion at the product level. On June 1, Musk announced the launch of the XChat system, which features end-to-end encryption, automatic information destruction, file transfer in any format, and cross-platform audio and video calls. He also claimed that it uses a Bitcoin-style encryption architecture and is developed in the Rust language. From a social messaging tool to a comprehensive platform, X is rapidly approaching the structural prototype of WeChat.
Combined with the previously launched content creator revenue sharing mechanism, the protest against Apples in-app purchase commission policy, and the advertising rebate for Twitter Blue users, it can be seen that Musk is building a closed ecosystem from content to payment. The prediction market is expected to become one of the earliest data product lines to achieve profitability in this ecosystem.
Musk once said that Xs cryptocurrency will never be issued, but this does not prevent him from continuing to promote the testing of on-chain financial functions. From the perspective of payment logic, the combination of prediction markets and crypto assets has natural advantages - trustlessness, quantification, and composability, which is consistent with the Web3 tool chain. If X launches a system similar to XPay in the future, Polymarket may also become part of the embedded function module, which is also complementary to the trend of the macro environment gradually becoming crypto-friendly.
Polymarket can speculate on the target
As a blockchain-based prediction market platform, Polymarket has not yet issued a native token, which makes many crypto community users look forward to its future token launch and airdrop.
UMA
At the same time, the market is also looking for direct speculation targets related to this. UMA is the core oracle of Polymarket, used to settle the results of the prediction market. Polymarket relies on UMAs Optimistic Oracle to ensure the fairness and reliability of market results.
X’s partnership with Polymarket could significantly increase Polymarket’s trading volume and user base, thereby increasing the usage and demand for UMA. As trading volume on Polymarket grows, demand for UMA oracles will increase, which could drive staking and governance demand for UMA tokens, further pushing up prices.
Polycule
As Polymarkets trading volume recovered, derivative projects developed around it also emerged.
Polycule is a streamlined Telegram trading robot designed to simplify trading on the Polymarket prediction market platform. On June 8, Polycule founder Krish announced on the X platform that he had received a $560,000 investment from Alliance.
