科技IPO大潮前夜，Polymarket联手纳斯达克抢「估值裁定权」

In this wave of tech IPO frenzy, everyone wants to "get on board," including Polymarket.

With SpaceX potentially listing on Nasdaq just 23 days away, this IPO is set to break all records in human history.

OpenAI was valued at $500 billion in its last funding round, Anthropic is reportedly worth $400 billion, and SpaceX at $1.75 trillion. Globally, 1,600 unicorn companies have a combined valuation of $5 trillion. Historically, returns from this sector have only been available to institutions and accredited investors. To buy shares directly in these companies, one needs a six-figure minimum, a one-year lock-up period, accredited investor status, and a strong network. Ordinary people simply cannot access them.

Furthermore, private companies have no obligation to disclose their valuations. Fundraising round valuations are lagging indicators, secondary market quotes are fragmented, and the actual transaction prices of employee shares are highly sensitive internal information. This, precisely, is the perfect entry point for prediction markets.

On May 19, ahead of this crucial moment, Polymarket announced an exclusive partnership with Nasdaq, launching a series of prediction contracts targeting the market capitalization of pre-IPO companies. Users can wager on whether OpenAI's valuation will break $1 trillion by year-end, whether Anthropic will reach $1.1 trillion by December 31, or whether SpaceX can hit $1.5 trillion before June 30. Nasdaq acts as the data source and is responsible for the final settlement of the contracts.

Polymarket already had a market for OpenAI's first-day closing market cap, which Bloomberg reported accumulated $1.6 million in trading volume since last September. Existing IPO contracts are more densely packed on Kalshi. The probability of Cerebras Systems IPOing before 2027 is priced at 95%, Kraken at 83%, Databricks at 70%, and Discord at 70%. OpenAI and Anthropic also have contracts available.

Both competing platforms are heavily focused on the pre-IPO wave.

Polymarket's Comeback

Over the past eight months, Polymarket has been overtaken by Kalshi in almost every visible metric.

In April, Kalshi's monthly trading volume was $14.8 billion, up 13% month-over-month. Polymarket's global volume, including its US app, totaled $10.2 billion, down 8.9% month-over-month. Active traders dropped from 733,000 in March to 643,000 in April, a 12% decline. In terms of valuation, Kalshi's latest round was at $22 billion, while Polymarket is reportedly in talks at $15 billion.

In an April report, Bank of America noted that in the US domestic prediction market, Kalshi commands approximately 89% of the market share.

Kalshi's path has been smoother than Polymarket's for years. In 2020, the CFTC granted Kalshi a Designated Contract Market license, the first and so far only one in the US specifically for event contract platforms. This means Kalshi can accept US dollars, issue 1099 tax forms, integrate an SDK with Robinhood, and have its probability data cited by CNN and CNBC. In February this year, Kalshi was selected by TIME for the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list, and its app store ranking once approached ChatGPT's.

Meanwhile, Polymarket withdrew from the US market in 2022 after being fined $1.4 million by the CFTC. It was only in July 2025 that the CFTC and the Department of Justice concluded a new investigation into the platform, allowing it to acquire a compliant trading license through the purchase of QCEX.

However, Polymarket's partnership with Nasdaq might be the signal of a counteroffensive beginning.

Polymarket partnered specifically with Nasdaq Private Market (hereafter referred to as NPM), a company incubated by Nasdaq that serves private companies. NPM's main business consists of two things:

First, organizing secondary market liquidity programs for employee shares. Employees at companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic hold significant amounts of options or restricted stock. Since these companies are not public, employees cannot sell on the open market. NPM helps these companies organize successive tender offers, allowing employees to sell their shares to approved external investors. NPM itself discloses that it has facilitated nearly $80 billion in such transactions, covering over 1,000 company-led liquidity programs and serving over 200,000 employee shareholders.

Second, building a valuation database of private companies. NPM sees daily transaction prices for employee shares of OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX on the secondary market. This data was previously sold only to institutional clients at substantial annual fees.

The key step in this partnership was NPM agreeing for the first time to make this valuation data available for Polymarket to use.

Rodolfo Sanchez, Vice President of Data at NPM, made a crucial statement in the press release: "The data flows in both directions." NPM provides data to Polymarket for contract settlement, and Polymarket's contract price curves, in turn, become "institutional signals" for NPM's clients. When an institutional client buys NPM data, they also receive a probability curve created by the real-time pricing of hundreds of thousands of retail traders.

Selling Data, Grabbing Settlement Rights, Capturing Retail Investors

This is not the first time Polymarket has sold its data.

In October 2025, ICE announced an investment of up to $2 billion at an $8 billion pre-money valuation. The key wasn't the valuation but the terms. ICE secured the global exclusive distribution rights for Polymarket's data. The sales channels of the NYSE parent company began selling Polymarket's probability data to global institutional clients.

In January 2026, an exclusive partnership with Dow Jones was announced. Polymarket's prediction data was integrated into the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, and Investor's Business Daily. The financial media matrix under News Corp began embedding Polymarket's probability signals as a standard module, similar to the Dow Jones Industrial Average or VIX.

In February 2026, ICE officially launched the Polymarket Signals and Sentiment product. Real-time quotes from thousands of contracts on Polymarket are aggregated into a structured data stream and distributed to institutional clients via the ICE Consolidated Feed, traveling on the same pipeline as NYSE stock data, bond prices, and corporate announcements. Ben Jackson, President of ICE, mentioned this product alongside Reddit and Dow Jones in the Q1 earnings call, calling it one of the three pillars of ICE's alternative data services.

This latest partnership is about seizing the settlement rights for this year's hottest segment: private market valuations.

We suspect that Kalshi won't stand idly by. Its next move is likely also to negotiate a partnership with a private market data provider, implementing a similar structure. However, mainstream private data providers like Forge and PitchBook are smaller than NPM and cover fewer companies. NPM has been exclusively secured by Polymarket. The cost for Kalshi to enter this arena will be significantly higher.