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

With the earliest possible IPO of SpaceX on Nasdaq in 23 days, this IPO is set to break all records in human history.

OpenAI's last round was valued at $500 billion, Anthropic is rumored to be valued at $400 billion, and SpaceX at $1.75 trillion. There are 1,600 unicorn companies globally, with a cumulative valuation of $5 trillion. Historically, returns in this area have only been available to institutions and accredited investors. To directly buy shares of these companies requires a six-figure threshold, a one-year lock-up period, accredited investor certification, and a network of relationships. Regular people have no access.

Additionally, private companies are not obligated to disclose valuations. Financing round valuations lag behind, and secondary market quotations are scattered. The actual transaction prices of employee stock are highly sensitive internal information. This is the best entry point for the prediction market.

On May 19, Polymarket launched an exclusive collaboration with Nasdaq just before this moment, introducing a series of prediction contracts targeting pre-IPO company valuations. Users can bet on whether OpenAI's end-of-year valuation will surpass $1 trillion, whether Anthropic will reach $1.1 trillion by December 31, and whether SpaceX can touch $1.5 trillion by June 30. Nasdaq serves as the data source, responsible for the final determination of contracts.

Polymarket previously had a market for OpenAI's first-day closing market cap, with Bloomberg reporting a trading volume of $1.6 million accumulated since last September. The IPO contracts available on Kalshi are denser, with Cerebras Systems' chance of IPO before 2027 bet at 95%, Kraken at 83%, Databricks at 70%, and Discord at 70%. OpenAI and Anthropic also have contracts.

Both competing platforms place great importance on this pre-IPO wave.

Polymarket's Comeback

In the past eight months, Polymarket has been surpassed by Kalshi in almost all visible metrics.

In April, Kalshi's monthly trading volume was $14.8 billion, a month-on-month increase of 13%. Polymarket's total worldwide, including the US app, was $10.2 billion, a month-on-month decrease of 8.9%. Active traders fell from 733,000 in March to 643,000 in April, a drop of 12%. In terms of valuation, Kalshi's latest round was at $22 billion, while Polymarket was reported to be negotiating at $15 billion.

Bank of America's report in April pointed out that Kalshi has taken approximately 89% of the market share in US prediction markets.

Kalshi's journey in recent years has been much smoother than Polymarket's. In 2020, the CFTC issued it a Designated Contract Market license, the first in the nation, and the only one specifically granted to an event contract platform. This means Kalshi can accept dollars, issue 1099 tax forms, connect with Robinhood for SDK integration, and allow CNN and CNBC to cite its probability data. In February of this year, Kalshi was selected by TIME for its TIME100 list of the most influential companies, with its app once nearing the popularity of ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, Polymarket withdrew from the US market after being fined $1.4 million by the CFTC in 2022. Only in July 2025 did the CFTC and the Department of Justice conclude a new investigation into it and obtain a compliance trading license through the acquisition of QCEX.

However, this collaboration with Nasdaq could very well be a signal of Polymarket's comeback.

The specific partner Polymarket collaborates with is Nasdaq Private Market (referred to as NPM hereafter), a company incubated by Nasdaq, which specifically serves private companies. Its main business involves two aspects:

First, organizing liquidity plans for employee stock in the secondary market. Employees of companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic hold a large number of options or restricted stock. Since the companies are not publicly listed, they cannot sell in the open market. NPM helps these companies organize a series of tender offers, enabling employees to sell stock to approved external investors. NPM itself reports that it has conducted nearly $80 billion in such transactions, covering over 1,000 company-led liquidity plans serving more than 200,000 employee shareholders.

Second, building a valuation database for private companies. NPM can see daily what prices OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX employee shares are trading at in the secondary market. This data was previously sold only to institutional clients for a hefty annual fee.

A key step in this collaboration is that NPM has agreed for the first time to provide this valuation data for Polymarket's use.

NPM's Vice President of Data, Rodolfo Sanchez, stated a crucial point in the press release: "The data flows in both directions." NPM provides Polymarket with data for contract settlement, while Polymarket's contract price curve becomes a "signal for institutions" that NPM clients can utilize. When institutional clients purchase NPM data, they also receive a probability curve that is priced in real-time by hundreds of thousands of retail investors.

Selling Data, Competing for Determination Rights, Competing for Retail Investors

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

In October 2025, ICE announced an investment of up to $2 billion, with a pre-investment valuation of $8 billion. The focus of this money was not on the valuation but on the terms. ICE obtained global exclusive distribution rights to Polymarket's data. The sales channels of NYSE's parent company began selling Polymarket's probability data to institutional clients globally.

In January 2026, Dow Jones entered into an exclusive partnership. 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 using Polymarket's probability signals as standard modules, similar to the Dow Jones Industrial Average and VIX, embedded in their editions.

In February 2026, ICE officially released the Polymarket Signals and Sentiment product. The real-time quotes of thousands of contracts on Polymarket were organized into structured data streams and distributed to institutional clients through the ICE Consolidated Feed, along with NYSE stock data, bond prices, and corporate announcements in the same pipeline. ICE President Ben Jackson 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 collaboration is about seizing the determination rights of valuations in the hottest private equity market this year.

We speculate that Kalshi won't be idle; its next step is likely to negotiate cooperation with a private equity market data provider to implement this structure. However, mainstream private equity data companies like Forge and PitchBook are smaller than NPM and cover fewer companies. NPM has already been exclusively taken by Polymarket. The cost for Kalshi to enter this field will be higher.

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