科技IPO大潮前夜，Polymarket聯手納斯達克搶「估值裁定權」

This wave of tech IPO frenzy has everyone wanting to "get on board," including Polymarket.

With just 23 days to go until the earliest possible SpaceX listing on Nasdaq, this will be an IPO that breaks 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. There are 1,600 unicorn companies globally, with a combined valuation of $5 trillion. Historically, returns from this sector have only been open to institutions and accredited investors. To directly buy shares in these companies, you need a six-figure minimum investment, a one-year lock-up period, accredited investor status, and the right connections. The average person simply can't access it.

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

On May 19th, Polymarket seized this timing to launch an exclusive partnership with Nasdaq, listing a series of prediction contracts targeting the market capitalizations of pre-IPO companies. Users can bet on whether OpenAI's valuation will break $1 trillion by year-end, whether Anthropic will hit $1.1 trillion by December 31st, or whether SpaceX can reach $1.5 trillion before June 30th. Nasdaq will act as the data source responsible for the final settlement of these contracts.

Polymarket previously had a market for OpenAI's first-day closing market cap, with Bloomberg reporting it had accumulated $1.6 million in trading volume since last September. Existing IPO contracts on Kalshi are even more numerous: Cerebras Systems' probability of an IPO 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 taking the pre-IPO wave very seriously.

Polymarket's Comeback

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

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

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

Kalshi's path has been smoother than Polymarket's over the past few years. In 2020, the CFTC granted it the first and, to date, only Designated Contract Market license specifically for event contracts. This allows Kalshi to handle USD, issue 1099 tax forms, integrate SDKs with Robinhood, and have its probability data cited by CNN and CNBC. In February, Kalshi was named to TIME's TIME100 Most Influential Companies list, and its app briefly rivaled ChatGPT's popularity.

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

However, Polymarket's partnership with Nasdaq could be a signal of a counterattack beginning.

Polymarket's specific partner is Nasdaq Private Market (hereinafter referred to as NPM), a company incubated by Nasdaq that specializes in serving private companies. Its main business revolves around two things:

First, organizing secondary market liquidity programs for employee shares. Employees at companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic hold substantial amounts of options or restricted stock. Since the companies aren't public, they can't sell on the open market. NPM helps these companies run a series of tender offers, allowing employees to sell their shares to approved external investors. NPM states it has facilitated nearly $80 billion in such transactions, covering over 1,000 company-led liquidity programs and serving more than 200,000 employee-shareholders.

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

The key step in this collaboration is that NPM has agreed to make this valuation data available to Polymarket for the first time.

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 in turn, Polymarket's contract price curves become "institutional signals" for NPM's clients. When institutional clients purchase NPM data, they also get access to a probability curve priced in real-time by hundreds of thousands of retail users.

Selling Data, Seizing Settlement Power, Capturing Retail Users

This isn't 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 focus of this deal wasn't just on the valuation, but on the terms. ICE secured the exclusive global distribution rights to Polymarket's data. The parent company of the NYSE began channeling Polymarket's probability data to institutional clients worldwide.

In January 2026, an exclusive deal with Dow Jones was signed. Polymarket's prediction data was integrated into the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, and Investor's Business Daily. The News Corp financial media empire started embedding Polymarket's probability signals as standard modules alongside indices like the Dow Jones or VIX in their publications.

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

This latest partnership is about seizing the settlement rights for the hottest sector right now: private market valuations.

We suspect Kalshi won't stay idle. Its next move will likely involve striking a deal with another private market data provider to implement a similar structure. However, mainstream private data providers like Forge and PitchBook are smaller in scale than NPM and cover fewer companies. NPM has already been snapped up exclusively by Polymarket. The cost for Kalshi to enter this arena will be higher.