"Prediction market" breakout moment: ICE enters the game, Hyperliquid increases investment, why are giants competing for "pricing uncertainty"?

When was the last time you heard about a billion-dollar funding round for Web3?

On October 7, 2025, the prediction market Polymarket officially announced that the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), will make a strategic investment of $2 billion, with a post-investment valuation of up to $9 billion. This is not only one of the highest funding amounts obtained by a Web3 project in recent years, but it also brings the potential and popularity of prediction markets to the forefront.

Interestingly, whether it's decentralized players like Hyperliquid joining the new battleground or compliant latecomers represented by Kalshi speeding up their catch-up, this competition is visibly accelerating.

Behind this, it is not only about who will dominate the future prediction markets, but also about how to financialize all uncertainties in the real world.

From Polymarket to Kalshi, blooming in multiple places.

Decentralized prediction markets have always been one of the important practical tracks of early blockchain applications. For example, I frequently saw examples of early players like Augur in many popular science books years ago—whether it was elections, weather, inflation, sports, or IPOs, users could directly trade "yes / no" contracts in a decentralized manner.

But in reality, although the concept was proposed early, it was not until the emergence of Polymarket that this concept truly broke out and reached a wider audience, largely thanks to the boost from the 2024 U.S. presidential election:

In the context of traditional polls generally leaning towards one side, Polymarket ultimately demonstrated that this decentralized prediction market, which uses "real money" voting, has extremely high reference value for observing market trends, with accurate predictions and verifiable price signals that surpass polling.

This has also led to Polymarket frequently becoming a mainstream media reference for probability in different events over the past six months. However, the prediction market has been struggling under the constraints of compliance. For example, in 2022, Polymarket was fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for operating an unregistered derivatives market and was prohibited from providing services to U.S. users.

In the past two years, Kalshi, which was established even earlier than Polymarket, has emerged as a strong contender by choosing a path focused on compliance—becoming the first prediction market platform regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Additionally, in October 2024, a federal court ruled that it was allowed to launch the first regulated election market in the U.S., further solidifying Kalshi's regulatory status.

Source: polymarketanalytics

As of October 10, 2025, based on the data comparison between Polymarket and Kalshi, apart from the total trading volume where Polymarket significantly outperformed with $1.3 billion vs $410 million, Polymarket lags behind Kalshi in terms of market count (10,200 vs 43,500) and open contract volume ($170 million vs $240 million).

It is worth noting that in order to return to the U.S. market, Polymarket has actually adopted a compliance integration strategy this year: as early as July, it acquired the trading platform QCX LLC, which holds a CFTC license, for $112 million and has begun self-certifying event contracts, including those for sports events and election markets.

This is also likely related to the latest $2 billion massive financing as a combined strategy, and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan released a tweet with the POLY symbol on October 9, which may become a key variable in the competition between the two giants.

From prediction markets to a larger mother set

Many people may be curious as to why the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, would place a massive bet of $2 billion on Polymarket.

This requires stepping out of Web3 and understanding prediction markets from a larger financial perspective.

First of all, ICE has been actively laying out in the Crypto field, including for many years with its parent company and multiple affiliated entities sequentially laying out crypto financial products, gradually covering Bitcoin spot, futures contracts, and so on, as well as the well-known crypto trading platform Bakkt.

Secondly, prediction markets are essentially a subset of "trading platforms" or another form of presentation. For example, there are many price prediction bets on mainstream crypto assets like BTC and ETH at different time points, such as the end of October and the end of the year, on Polymarket.

Theoretically, if the time points for predictions are infinitely subdivided, from the end of the year to the end of today, then to 1 minute later, and 1 second later, this essentially becomes instant "betting" (buying and selling) on the trading platform. What ICE values may be precisely this ability to financialize all uncertainties, which can expand the boundaries of the existing futures, options, and other derivatives markets.

Therefore, platforms like Polymarket, which have a large user base and trading volume, can serve as a key entry point for ICE Group's future structured financial products, institutional hedging tools, and information pricing services. In other words, ICE is not focused on a single application, but rather is betting on the potential of predicting the "derivatization of all" uncertainties in the market.

For this reason, in addition to the competition from Polymarket and Kalshi, which resemble a more specialized path of event markets, decentralized players like Hyperliquid are also beginning to explore a hybrid path that integrates prediction modules at the entry point of high-performance contract platforms. Each of these paths has its strengths and weaknesses, but in the future, they may also complement or compete with each other.

Hyperliquid as a new variable for decentralized players

For example, the HIP-3 proposal passed by Hyperliquid introduces a permissionless, developer-deployed perpetual contract market on the core infrastructure. Previously, only the core team could launch trading pairs, but now any user who stakes 1 million HYPE can directly deploy their own market on-chain.

In short, HIP-3 allows the creation and launch of any asset derivative market on Hyperliquid without permission, completely breaking the limitation that past Perp DEX could only trade mainstream cryptocurrencies.

This not only means an open contract deployment mechanism but also lays a technical foundation for the subsequent prediction market module. In the future, users may be able to directly trade such markets on Hyperliquid:

• "Will the Federal Reserve cut interest rates at the next meeting?"
• "Will BTC break through 70,000 USD this week?"
• "Will Arbitrum TVL exceed Base by the end of the month?"

In this architecture, the prediction market is no longer an independent track, but rather a sub-module within the on-chain high-performance derivatives system. Due to its reuse of Hyperliquid's matching depth, liquidation system, and order book logic, it inherently possesses higher trading efficiency and capital utilization.

In contrast, Polymarket's model leans more towards "event trading," while Hyperliquid's model leans more towards "price trading"— one starts from information, the other from structure, yet both point towards the same ultimate goal: to have the probabilities of the future priced in real-time by the market.

written at the end

Overall, with the involvement of heavyweight decentralized players like Hyperliquid and the $2 billion investment from ICE as key milestones, the prediction market is no longer just a small tool for everyone to "bet" or "predict the future," but has become a outpost for institutions, analysts, and even central banks to observe market sentiment.

This also means that it is no longer just a paradise for speculators, but is rapidly transforming into a highly efficient and liquid financial derivatives market, becoming an indispensable financial primitive in the DeFi infrastructure.