X, formerly Twitter, announced on Friday that it has partnered with Polymarket, naming it the platform’s official prediction market partner. Launched in 2020, Polymarket allows users to bet on the outcomes of real-world events using cryptocurrency.
Although the companies didn’t announce specifics about the partnership, they shared that they will be launching “an integrated product to deliver data-driven insights and recommendations.” Polymarket predictions will be combined with X data to deliver live insights, with real-time annotations of market moves from Grok and relevant X posts, Polymarket explained in a press release.
The product will be the first in “a suite of integrations and unique experiences” that will emerge from the partnership, the company said.
“Combining Polymarket’s accurate, unbiased, and real-time prediction market probabilities with Grok’s analysis and X’s real time insights will enable us to provide contextualized, data-driven insights to millions of Polymarket users around the world instantaneously,” said Shayne Coplan, founder and CEO of Polymarket, in the press release. “We look forward to enhancing X and Polymarket users’ ability to make instant sense of breaking news and make informed decisions about the future as we continue to scale our platform.”
In 2024, over $8 billion in predictions were made on Polymarket across politics, current events, pop culture, and more.
The news comes nearly a year after Polymarket partnered with AI-powered search engine Perplexity to display news summaries of events. This happened around the same time that Polymarket partnered with Substack to allow writers to embed prediction data from its platform into their posts.
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Circle, one of the world’s largest issuers of USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, ended its first trading day as a public company at $83.23 per share, 168% above its IPO price of $31 set the previous day.
The IPO pop demonstrates public market investors’ interest in cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in particular amid the Trump administration’s supportive stance on crypto assets.
The significant surge in Circle’s first-day trading could prompt institutional investors to set higher IPO prices for upcoming listings. Imminent IPOs include Omada Health, which is pricing on Thursday, and Klarna, a fintech that’s set to list next week.
The company’s IPO price, at which shares it sold shares, set its initial market value at $6.1 billion, a figure that fell short of Circle’s last private market valuation of $7.7 billion, set it April 2021 when the company raised a $400 million Series F in April 2021, according to PitchBook data.
But the big pop cleaned that up and then some. Circle’s market capitalization (excluding employee options) stood at $16.7 billion by the close of trading. And the company raised about $1.1 billion in the offering.
Circle joins a growing list of companies whose IPOs are priced below their private market highs, including recent ‘down-round’ offerings from healthtech Hinge, contractor platform ServiceTitan, and social network Reddit. So that’s not likely to dissuade startups looking for signs that now is the right time to go public.
Circle’s successful IPO comes three years after Circle’s previous attempt at going public. The stablecoin issuer had plans to combine with a SPAC in 2022 at a $9 billion valuation.
The company’s largest outside shareholders are General Catalyst, which held approximately 8.9% of all stock before the offering, and IDG Capital, which owned 8.8% of all shares. Other significant venture investors include Accel, Breyer Capital and Oak Investment Partners, according to the S1.
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