The global technology IPO boom is on the brink, and SpaceX is expected to land on NASDAQ as soon as 23 days later. This IPO event, which is expected to break all records in human IPO history, is igniting the enthusiasm of the entire private equity market. OpenAI's previous valuation reached 500 billion yuan, Anthropic is rumored to be valued at 400 billion yuan, and SpaceX is as high as 1.75 trillion yuan; The cumulative valuation of 1600 unicorn companies worldwide exceeds $5 trillion. This attractive wealth cake has always been open only to institutions and qualified investors in history - with a six figure investment threshold, a one-year lock up period, qualified investor certification, and a deep industry relationship network, multiple barriers have kept ordinary investors out.

More importantly, private equity firms do not need to disclose valuation information, with financing round valuations lagging behind, secondary market quotes scattered, and the true transaction price of employee stock ownership being highly sensitive internal secrets. This information asymmetry provides an excellent entry point for predicting the market. In this tech IPO feast, all players want to seize the opportunity, and Polymarket is no exception. Before the boom, it chose to join forces with Nasdaq to launch the Pre IPO valuation prediction contract, attempting to reverse the situation of being completely suppressed by competitor Kalshi for the past eight months and start a turnaround battle related to survival and development.

Pre IPO Trend: Predicting the New Battlefield of the Market, Polymarket Competes with Kalshi on the Same Stage

On May 19th, Polymarket announced an exclusive partnership with NASDAQ to launch a batch of predictive contracts targeting the market value of Pre IPO companies, turning this tech IPO boom into its own breakthrough opportunity. Users can bet on the valuation trends of core technology companies through the platform: whether OpenAI's year-end valuation can exceed 1 trillion yuan, whether Anthropic will reach 1.1 trillion yuan before December 31, and whether SpaceX will reach 1.5 trillion yuan before June 30. In this collaboration, Nasdaq will serve as the official data source and be responsible for the final outcome determination of all contracts, providing endorsement for the authority and fairness of the contracts.

In fact, Polymarket is not the first to lay out the Pre IPO prediction track. According to Bloomberg, since September last year, the platform has launched a forecast of OpenAI's first day closing market value, with a cumulative trading volume of $1.6 million. And its competitor Kalshi has a more intensive layout in the Pre IPO prediction field. Currently, the platform has launched multiple related contracts, among which the probability of Cerebras Systems' IPO before 2027 is predicted to be 95%, and the IPO probabilities of Kraken, VNet, Discord are all predicted to be 70%. Leading technology companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic also have corresponding prediction contracts.

Obviously, both prediction market giants have keenly grasped the huge potential of the Pre IPO track. With the advent of the tech IPO boom, the competition around private equity valuation prediction has entered a white hot stage. For Polymarket, this competition is even more of a 'last ditch battle' - in the past eight months, it has been completely overtaken by Kalshi on almost all core indicators.

Under difficult circumstances: Polymarket is completely suppressed by Kalshi, and the gap continues to widen

The current pattern of the US forecasting market has shown a clear trend of "one dominant player". According to a report released by Bank of America in April, Kalshi has occupied approximately 89% of the domestic forecast market in the United States, while Polymarket is struggling with weak growth.

In terms of trading volume, Kalshi's monthly trading volume reached 14.8 billion US dollars in April, an increase of 13% compared to the previous month, maintaining a steady upward trend; The total transaction volume of Polymarket's global business and US App was only 10.2 billion US dollars, a decrease of 8.9% compared to the previous period, showing negative growth. The number of active traders is also not optimistic, with Polymarket's active users dropping from 733000 in March to 643000 in April, a monthly decline of 12%. The gap in valuation is even more significant: Kalshi's latest valuation has reached $22 billion, while Polymarket is currently reportedly negotiating a valuation of only $15 billion, with a huge gap between the two.

Behind this gap lies the vastly different development paths of the two platforms. The development of Kalshi can be described as "smooth sailing". In 2020, it obtained the Designated Contract Market license issued by the CFTC - the first and only license specifically issued to event contract platforms in the United States. This compliance advantage allows Kalshi to fully connect with the US domestic market: it can directly receive USD transactions, issue 1099 tax returns for users, integrate with Robinhood SDK, and even its probability data has been cited by mainstream media such as CNN and CNBC. In February of this year, Kalshi was also included in the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list, and its app's ranking in the app store once approached ChatGPT, with its popularity and influence continuing to rise.

On the other hand, Polymarket's development path is full of obstacles. In 2022, Polymarket was fined $1.4 million by the CFTC for compliance issues and subsequently forced to withdraw from the US market; It was not until July 2025 that the CFTC and the Department of Justice concluded a new round of investigation into it, and Polymarket regained its compliance trading license by acquiring QCEX, allowing it to return to the US market. As a cryptocurrency based prediction platform, Polymarket allows users to place bets on various real-world event outcomes using stablecoins. It gained fame during the 2024 US presidential election, with a cumulative transaction volume exceeding $15.7 billion. However, compliance challenges have left it lagging behind in competition with Kalshi.

However, an exclusive partnership with Nasdaq may be the key to turning the tide for Polymarket, as this carefully planned comeback hides its core strategic considerations.

PlayerUnknown's Battleback: Holding Hands with NASDAQ NPM, Seizing the Core Advantage of Pre IPO

The core partner of Polymarket's cooperation this time is not Nasdaq itself, but Nasdaq Private Market (NPM) incubated by Nasdaq - a platform that focuses on serving non listed companies. With its unique business advantages, it has become a key driving force for Polymarket's breakthrough. As an important component of the NASDAQ system, NPM has previously acquired stock management company SecondMarket Solutions Inc. and formed joint ventures with giants such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, accumulating profound resources and experience in the field of non publicly traded companies.

The core business of NPM is mainly divided into two major segments, which precisely match the demand of Pre IPO prediction market. One is to organize a secondary market liquidity plan for employee stocks: employees of leading technology companies such as OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic hold a large number of options or restricted stocks, which cannot be traded on the public market due to the company's unlisted status. NPM helps employees sell their stocks to approved external investors through organizing rounds of tender offers. According to NPM's own disclosure, it has completed nearly $80 billion in such transactions, covering over 1000 company led liquidity plans and serving more than 200000 employee shareholders.

Secondly, establish a valuation database for private equity firms: NPM can obtain real-time secondary market transaction prices of employee stocks from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, etc. These highly valuable valuation data were originally only open to institutional clients and had high annual fees. The key breakthrough of this collaboration is that NPM has agreed to open up these core valuation data to Polymarket for the first time, providing the most accurate and authoritative data support for its Pre IPO forecasting contracts.

As Rodolfo Sanchez, Vice President of Data at NPM, stated in a press release, "The data flows in both directions. This cooperation is not a one-way resource output, but a two-way empowerment: NPM provides data to Polymarket for contract settlement, ensuring the fairness and accuracy of contract results; The contract price curve on Polymarket, in turn, will become an "institutional signal" available to NPM institutional clients - institutional clients can also obtain probability curves priced in real-time by hundreds of thousands of retail investors when purchasing NPM valuation data, further enriching the reference value of the data.

This two-way empowerment cooperation model has established a unique competitive barrier for Polymarket in the Pre IPO prediction track, and behind this is Polymarket's long-term deep cultivation and layout in the field of "data monetization".

Core chips: monetization of data+competition for decision-making power, Polymarket's long-term layout

The cooperation with Nasdaq NPM is essentially a continuation and upgrade of Polymarket's "data monetization" strategy, and a key step in its struggle for the Pre IPO track ruling power. In fact, Polymarket has already started its data commercialization layout, transforming the platform's predictive data into core competitiveness through cooperation with mainstream financial institutions and media.

In October 2025, the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced a maximum investment of $2 billion in Polymarket, with a pre investment valuation of $8 billion. The core value of this investment lies not in the funds themselves, but in the terms of the partnership: ICE has obtained exclusive global distribution rights for Polymarket data, and the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, with its strong sales channels, has begun to help Polymarket sell probability data to global institutional clients. This cooperation also led to Polymarket's trading volume reaching a new high, with the total trading volume with Kalshi exceeding $2 billion for the first time, surpassing the peak during the 2024 US presidential election.

In January 2026, Polymarket reached an exclusive partnership with Dow Jones and officially integrated its forecast data into the financial media matrix of News Corp, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and MarketWatch. These media outlets began to use Polymarket's probability signals as standard financial indicators such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and VIX, embedding them in their daily reporting pages, further enhancing the authority and influence of Polymarket data.

In February 2026, ICE officially launched the "Polymarket Signals and Sentiment" product, which organizes the real-time quotes of thousands of contracts on the Polymarket into a structured data stream and distributes it to institutional customers through ICE Consolidated Feed, sharing the same distribution pipeline as core financial data such as stock data, bond prices, and company announcements on the New York Stock Exchange. ICE President Ben Jackson placed the product on par with Reddit and Dow Jones at the Q1 earnings conference, calling it one of the three pillars of ICE's alternative data services, demonstrating the core value of Polymarket data.

And in this collaboration with NPM, Polymarket's core goal is to seize the hottest private equity market valuation decision-making power of the year - in the Pre IPO prediction track, the authority of data directly determines the platform's competitiveness, and NPM's exclusive data support gives Polymarket an absolute advantage in decision-making power.

It can be foreseen that Kalshi will not sit idly by as Polymarket seizes the initiative, and its next step is likely to seek cooperation with a private equity market data provider to replicate this "data+arbitration" model. Unfortunately, mainstream private equity data providers such as Forge and PitchBook are far behind NPM in terms of size and company coverage, and NPM's exclusive cooperation rights have been locked in by Polymarket. This means that Kalshi will have to pay higher costs to enter this track, and Polymarket will also widen the gap with its competitors.

Conclusion: Under the IPO boom, can Polymarket turn the tide with the opportunity for a comeback?

The arrival of the technology IPO boom has opened up new growth opportunities for the prediction market, and Pre IPO valuation prediction is the most promising track in this boom. Despite being completely suppressed by Kalshi, Polymarket seized this opportunity and successfully built its own competitive barriers through exclusive cooperation with Nasdaq NPM, leveraging its core data advantages and two-way empowerment model, launching a comeback battle.

It is worth noting that the rise of the prediction market has attracted traditional financial giants to enter the market. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) plans to launch financial contracts linked to sports events and economic indicators by the end of this year, which will directly compete with Polymarket and Kalshi. The regulatory advantage of CME may further change the industry landscape. But for Polymarket, this collaboration with NPM has already earned it a valuable first mover advantage.

The key to this turnaround lies in whether Polymarket can fully utilize NPM's exclusive data advantage, continuously expand its market share in the Pre IPO prediction track, and further enhance the platform's authority and influence by leveraging its own accumulation in data monetization. The curtain of the tech IPO boom is about to kick off, and whether Polymarket can use this opportunity to counterattack, break Kalshi's monopoly pattern, and redefine the competitive rules of the prediction market is worth the continuous attention of the entire industry.