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Story: ICE Drops $2 Billion on Polymarket as Kalshi Hits $22 Billion Valuation

By Evie Vavasseur

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Two Companies, Two Very Different Valuations. Kalshi just raised over $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation. That's double its previous estimate.

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Polymarket's Push Back Into the U.S. Market. Polymarket isn't just sitting on the ICE deal. It's moving fast on multiple fronts.

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Congress Isn't Convinced. None of this is happening in a friendly regulatory environment.

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The Intercontinental Exchange just wrote a $2 billion check for Polymarket. Not for the trading volume. For the data.

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ICE's deal includes equity and global distribution rights to Polymarket's event-driven data — a product that prices real-world probabilities in real time, continuously, across a…

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Kalshi just raised over $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation. That's double its previous estimate. Annual revenue sits somewhere between $850 million and $1.

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And yet Polymarket is valued at $15 billion. Lower, sure. But the framing matters. Kalshi gets valued like an exchange.

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That's a pretty meaningful distinction when you're talking about where this sector goes in five years.

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Polymarket isn't just sitting on the ICE deal. It's moving fast on multiple fronts. The company acquired QCEX, a CFTC-licensed entity, which gives it a legal path back into the U.

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On top of that, Polymarket bought Brahma, a DeFi infrastructure startup, to strengthen its on-chain stack.

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And then there's Chainalysis. Polymarket brought in Chainalysis specifically to monitor for insider trading and market manipulation.

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Read also: Crypto Industry Seen Adding $55 Billion and 232,000 Jobs to US Economy

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None of this is happening in a friendly regulatory environment. At least seven bills in Congress are targeting prediction markets right now.

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Not yet clear how any of those bills will move. But the pressure is real.

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What's interesting is that major institutional money keeps flowing in anyway. ICE's $2 billion, Kalshi's $1 billion raise — these aren't small players making speculative bets.

The Currency Analytics

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