The Closing Bell: ICE Talks Polymarket In Q3 Earnings; 'We Were Attracted By Their Non-Sports Activities'
Roundup: Coinbase's CEO says almost every word you could bet on at Polymarket and Kalshi during earnings call; Romania blacklists Polymarket; Kalshi scrubs 'sportsbook' mentions from job listing.
Polymarket raising $2 billion from Intercontinental Exchange was a big moment for the rise of prediction markets in the US and internationally. We got more insight from ICE during its Q3 earnings call, where the company talked more about the investment, including the idea that sports betting was not a material part of the deal.
Here’s the key excerpt from ICE CEO Jeffrey Sprecher on the earnings call:
“Polymarket, if they can navigate the sports complex, kind of not high on our list in terms of what we’re going to contribute to them and what they’ll contribute to us.”
Here is a transcript of some of the relevant parts of the call from Sprecher on Polymarket (cleaned up a bit for readability and emphasis added by me):
Given ICE’s recently announced investment and business relationship with Polymarket, I thought it might be helpful to explain our thinking on the evolution of markets. …
Alongside our investment, we’ve also announced a strategic data agreement under which ICE will become a global distributor of Polymarket’s highly-differentiated event-driven data. As the leader in non-sports prediction markets, Polymarket provides real-time probabilities on events like elections, economic indicators and cultural trends, offering a powerful new layer of insight supporting more informed decision-making.
We believe that we can accelerate Polymarket’s acceptance into the traditional financial system by virtue of our distribution, understanding and long-time customer relationships. And we believe Polymarket’s engineering team can help ICE’s engineers better understand our own adoption of evolving banking technology, a relationship that is already paying dividends to both of us. ICE is in the process of rolling out an advanced clearing model for our global clearing houses, one that we’ve very elegantly named ICE Risk Model 2. Our new clearing system was built on the existing local banking and regulatory infrastructure for funds movement and collateral management.
However, the current regulatory environment is being confronted by collateral management using tokens, which I believe will help evolve regulatory oversight to take advantage of 24/7 capital movement. And ICE intends to be at the forefront of driving this evolution given our own use-case of operating six global clearing houses with differing collateral and regulatory environments. Such an evolution can make global clearing and trade settlement more efficient and we’ve seen that the efficient use of collateral typically results in increased trading volumes and transaction revenues. One does not have to look too far to see the trading volumes in the U.S. equities markets have dramatically increased since the industry freed up collateral by moving from T+2 day to T+1 day settlement times.
Beyond the rewiring of funds movement, Polymarket has pioneered the rapid listing of new markets, driven by real-time consumer demand. Traditional exchanges have been subject to government approvals of our new product launches, which at best take 30 days and in many countries, substantially longer. Polymarket is forcing a dialogue in the U.S. on how to minimize government regulatory burdens, so as to not impede innovators. We think this dialogue will ultimately benefit new product innovation for all markets and certainly for ICE.
And later on:
Well, I reached out to Shayne, the founder of Polymarket early in the summer after it became clear that the Trump administration and the US Congress was going to validate much of what was being done with stablecoins and ultimately on the blockchain and it was in that environment that we began conversation and that was before the NFL football season. And we were attracted by their non-sports activities where they really are a global leader. And we really think that data and information supply-chain data, acts of god, weather, corporate actions, we think that kind of information is going to be very interesting to traditional finance. In fact, we know it is. Anecdotally, Shayne and I are very well aware of — many institutional investors that are already scraping data or finding data and making its way into — informally into their traditional decision-making.
And so sports was not something that really got our interest. I think it’s great for Polymarket if they can make a business around that and make earnings around that and certainly, longer-term for our equity stake in the business, that would be great. But we’re not a venture firm. We don’t — you guys won’t really reward us if we make a lot of money on that investment. Honestly, I think we’ll be rewarded if we can bring the underlying technologies into our workflow and increase our sales revenue and manage our costs. And so a long-winded way of saying good for Polymarket if they can navigate the sports complex, kind of not high on our list in terms of what we’re going to contribute to them and what they’ll contribute to us.
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Prediction markets news roundup
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong flips prediction markets with last-minute earnings call word salad (Fast Company): “Coinbase Global, one of the largest crypto exchanges on the market, announced its third-quarter 2025 earnings on Thursday — a relatively benign event by most measures. But it wasn’t the revenue or profit numbers that caught many people’s attention. It was some specific comments and words spoken by CEO and cofounder Brian Armstrong. Armstrong, near the end of Coinbase’s earnings call, squeezed in a last-second barrage of keywords.”
“I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call.”
“While that may not have meant a lot to most listeners, Armstrong was actually saying specific words that bettors on prediction markets had wagered he would say.”
More (from me): You could bet on this at both Polymarket and Kalshi. Armstrong missed saying both “crypto winter” and “shutdown,” but otherwise hit all the other mentions you could trade. Very little was traded at Polymarket, but there was $80,000 in volume at Kalshi:
NY Won’t Enforce Cease-And-Desist Against Kalshi Until Court Rules On Injunction (InGame): “The state of New York will not enforce its cease-and-desist order against Kalshi until a court rules on whether to grant the prediction market an injunction. In a stipulation and order filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New York Tuesday, both parties agreed on a timeline for parts of the case.”
Kalshi Scrubs ‘Sportsbook’ From Job Listing (Sportico): “Kalshi has altered an open job listing for a ‘sports operations’ position to scrub references to sportsbooks in three places after the language, which seemed to clash with the company claiming it has nothing to do with gambling, was pointed out on social media. The prediction market platform has said there is a large distinction between the sports bets it offers through an exchange format and gambling. As part of this, Kalshi has emphasized differences between its app and traditional sportsbooks such as DraftKings and FanDuel.”
You can still see the language on Kalshi’s LinkedIn and at ZipRecruiter.
FWIW, some version of Kalshi job listings mentioning the term “sportsbooks” has been up since September:
Kalshi made a new AI ad: You can click through to watch.
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Jim And Maureen Downs, Architects Who Foresaw The Rise Of Prediction Markets (InGame): “Two people who think they have an idea what the near-future holds are Jim and Maureen Downs. Their company, Connamara Technologies, built the exchange platform (EP3) that powers ForecastEx, a major prediction and event market licensed as both an exchange and a clearinghouse by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). For decades, the Downses have been market architects, watching technology fundamentally reshape trading, from the grain pits of the Chicago Board of Trade to the options floor of the CBOE. They didn’t just foresee the rise of prediction exchanges; they built the engine making the challenge possible, and they believe this disruption is inevitable, and likely a good development for retail customers of sportsbooks and exchanges.”
Romania includes the Polymarket platform on the blacklist of unauthorized sites (press release, translated to English): The National Office for Gambling (ONJN) decided in its meeting on October 29 to include the Polymarket platform on the blacklist of operators carrying out gambling activities without a license on Romanian territory.
The decision comes in the context of an explosive increase in activity on this platform during the election period.
According to public data available on this platform itself, during the presidential elections in Romania, the total value of transactions made (”transacted volume”) exceeded 600 million dollars, and for the local elections in Bucharest, the volume already exceeded 15 million dollars.
It is important to emphasize that the term “transacted volume” does not represent amounts actually bet once, but the cumulative value of all transactions between users, through which they have staked and exchanged financial positions depending on the outcome of a future event.
These figures reflect, however, a high level of unregulated betting activity, carried out outside any fiscal, technical or integrity control, which circumvents the legal obligations imposed on licensed operators — including those regarding player protection, reporting to the National Office for the Prevention and Combating of Money Laundering, and payment of taxes and contributions to the state budget.
Although Polymarket is often presented as an “event trading platform” or a “prediction market”, from a legal and functional point of view it meets all the criteria of a counterparty bet. …
The platform does not mediate investments, but organizes bets between participants, without a license and without supervision.
ONJN points out that gambling is a state monopoly and can only be organized by licensed and authorized operators. Accepting the idea that a “counterparty betting” system can be called “trading” would create a dangerous precedent, whereby any operator could “reinterpret” the counterparty betting activity as a stock exchange activity – circumventing strict gambling or capital markets regulations.
Kalshi adds native support for Base USDC deposits (CryptoBriefing): “Kalshi, a regulated prediction market platform, today added native support for USDC deposits on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network. The integration expands Kalshi’s blockchain deposit capabilities beyond its existing networks. The platform has been actively integrating with multiple blockchain networks to offer native crypto deposits to users.”
