📊 ICE locks up Polymarket

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Here’s what we got for you today:

• 💰 ICE will be Wall Street's exclusive Polymarket dealer

• ⚔️ Prediction market civil war erupts

• ✝️ A meta-market on Polymarket turns Jesus' return into a volatility trade

• 📈 Market Moves

• 📊 Odds & Ends

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, is now packaging and selling Polymarket data to institutional traders. The new Polymarket Signals and Sentiment tool delivers normalized prediction market data through ICE's existing data infrastructure, the same pipes Wall Street already uses for securities pricing, fundamentals, and corporate actions. ICE has exclusive rights to distribute this data for institutional capital markets, which means if a hedge fund or asset manager wants Polymarket signals in a format their systems can actually ingest, they're going through ICE.

The product does more than just pipe in raw contract prices. ICE is using its entity identification and reference databases to map Polymarket prediction markets to specific securities and companies, so traders can overlay crowd-sourced probability assessments directly onto their existing positions and watchlists. Near real-time access comes through the ICE Consolidated Feed, and historical time-series data is available through ICE Consolidated History for backtesting. "With billions in trading volumes, they are allowing us to structure dynamic views of key market-moving economic, political, and market events from unstructured datasets," said Chris Edmonds, President of ICE's Fixed Income and Data Services.

For Polymarket, this is the institutional stamp of approval the platform has been building toward. "These markets reflect collective expectations on market-moving events in near real time and have quickly emerged as a credible input alongside traditional data sources," said CEO Shayne Coplan. Getting bundled into the same data suite as Reddit sentiment and Dow Jones analytics, the other two sources in ICE's Signals & Sentiment service, positions prediction market data as just another feed on a Bloomberg terminal, not some exotic crypto curiosity.

The competitive implications are worth spelling out. An exclusive distribution deal with the company that runs NYSE creates a moat that other prediction market platforms can't easily replicate. Kalshi has its own institutional ambitions and CFTC-regulated contracts, but it doesn't have a distribution partner with ICE's reach across fixed income and equity desks. Polymarket just leapfrogged into institutional workflows through the back door.

Polymarket’s partnership with ICE is the clearest sign yet that prediction markets have graduated from novelty to infrastructure. When the owner of NYSE treats your data the same way it treats corporate earnings and bond pricing, the "is this just gambling?" debate has some holes. Two years ago, traders were pulling up Polymarket in a browser tab between Bloomberg screens. Now it's just another column in the feed.

PREDICTION MARKETS ARE NOW BETTING ON THEMSELVES⚔️

Polymarket and Kalshi have gotten so big that traders are placing bets on which one wins. A Manifold Markets contract, "Top 1 prediction market by volume in 2026?", has drawn over $50 million in notional value on that exact question. Polymarket leads at 47%. Kalshi sits at 34%. The resolution criteria is raw USD volume for the year, verified by third-party data. Pure signal.

The gap is wider than it looks. Combined weekly volume across both platforms just hit $6.32 billion, a record. Kalshi has a slight edge in raw numbers, roughly 51/49, but its volume is heavily weighted toward sports contracts cleared through its Robinhood integration, over $43.1 billion worth in 2025. Polymarket's $33.4 billion skews toward geopolitics, macro, and Fed decisions. That's the liquidity institutions actually want to be near, and it's why the odds favor Polymarket despite the smaller topline number.

Two moves explain the confidence spread. First, Polymarket acquired QCEX, a CFTC-licensed exchange, for $112 million in late 2025, giving it legal U.S. access and neutralizing Kalshi's biggest structural advantage. Second, Kalshi is catching state-level flak: gaming commissions in Massachusetts and Nevada issued cease-and-desist orders, trying to reclassify event contracts as gambling. Federal regulators have backed off, but state friction is exactly the kind of slow-bleed risk that shaves probability points.

Kalshi still has momentum. Its Super Bowl numbers were absurd, with downloads up 1,500% year-over-year and nearly 2 million daily active users on game day. But the Manifold contract excludes pure sports volume. The real question is whether those millions of new users stick around to trade politics and economics, or whether they churned the Monday after kickoff.

The wildcard is Coinbase, expected to launch its own prediction market in late Q1. It has both the crypto-native user base and the regulatory licenses, a combination either incumbent would struggle to replicate alone. If it executes, the current odds need repricing.

The most interesting thing here: a prediction market contract about prediction markets has become one of the most liquid meta-bets in the space. The industry is reflexive enough to price its own future. That's infrastructure.

POLYMARKET BUILT A DERIVATIVE ON THE SECOND COMING ✝️

Bloomberg made the "Will Jesus Christ return?" market famous last year when it pointed out that betting "No" on the 2025 version - which attracted $3.3 million in total volume - was effectively a bond trade. Get in early enough and you could pocket an annualized 5.5% return, better than a Treasury bill, just by wagering that the Son of God would not, in fact, make his Second Coming before New Year's. The 2026 edition has been humming along at roughly the same ~3% implied odds, with $2.49 million in volume. Safe, boring, and mildly blasphemous.

Then somebody built a derivative on top of it. On February 6, a new Polymarket market appeared that resolves "Yes" if the underlying Jesus contract's price clears 5% for a majority of minutes between 12:00 and 12:59 AM ET on February 17 - a single thin-liquidity midnight hour. That derivative is currently trading around 15% with about $186k in volume. The incentive is obvious: if you hold "Yes" shares in the derivative, you can buy "Yes" in the underlying market right before the window, nudge the price above the threshold, and collect on both sides. Traders have already pushed the underlying from 3% to 4.7%. They haven't cleared the hump yet, but they've got a week.

Polymarket's own users aren't confused about what's happening. In the derivative market's comment section, one user wrote, "This market is 100% manipulation." Another helpfully clarified: "It is a kind of a bet on wether [sic] there will be successful manipulation or not." The FT flagged the same thing, noting that thin markets plus a narrow time window make it trivially easy for a whale to move the number. It's not theology driving the price action - it's a $186k wager on whether you can game a midnight snapshot on a $2.5 million market about the literal apocalypse.

The CFTC just said it plans to write new rules for prediction markets. Situations like this one - where a derivative market exists purely to incentivize manipulating the underlying, and everyone involved knows it - might be worth putting near the top of the stack.

MARKET MOVES 📈

📈 Biggest swing: “Will the US add more than 125K jobs in January?” moved 9% → 100% (Polymarket)

💰 Top earner: @0x876426B52898C295848f56760dd24B55Eda2604a-1770663426746 - $164,727 24H Profit (Polymarket)

🤔 Weirdest market: “Clavicular charged again by June 30?” (Polymarket)

ODDS & ENDS 📊

• Mert launches new price-only prediction market trading terminal powered by DFlow on Solana.

• 5 minute markets are now live on Polymarket.

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