Coverage spread: 2 sources — 1 left · 1 center
Lean ratings via AllSides / Media Bias-Fact-Check. How this works.
Where they agree
- Prediction market platforms have grown rapidly and are attracting massive private funding at multi-billion-dollar valuations.
- Polymarket and Kalshi are the two dominant players in this space and are frequently compared to each other.
- Both pieces reflect the same underlying trend: prediction markets are expanding well beyond their original scope (elections, sports) into new domains.
Where they differ
- CNBC focuses purely on the financial and business angle: Polymarket’s valuation talks, revenue, and trading volume data.
- The Guardian piece is a personal opinion essay focused on the ethical implications of Kalshi’s plan to let users bet on clinical trial and FDA outcomes, not on Polymarket’s fundraising.
- CNBC treats Kalshi mainly as a valuation benchmark/competitor to Polymarket, while The Guardian centers Kalshi as the company introducing a controversial new betting category.
- CNBC discloses a commercial relationship with Kalshi; The Guardian’s piece is written from the personal perspective of a patient’s family member, giving it an emotional rather than financial framing.
What’s happening with Polymarket’s valuation
Polymarket, the prediction market platform, is in talks for a new fundraising round that would value the company at more than $20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to CNBC. Bloomberg first reported the talks and valuation. Polymarket declined to comment when CNBC asked about the report.
This would follow a funding round the company closed in April at a $15 billion valuation, which The Information had reported on at the time without confirmation from Polymarket. That April round reportedly included a $600 million direct cash investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, which had been announced back in March. If the new round closes, it would be the first since Polymarket officially launched its regulated U.S. exchange in May, after debuting with a waitlist the previous December.
CNBC reported in late June that Polymarket’s annualized revenue was already well above $1 billion following that U.S. launch. Trading volume has kept climbing: the U.S. exchange is now handling more than $100 million in daily notional volume, up from about $75 million in late May, while Polymarket’s international platform is seeing daily notional volume above $150 million, according to Dune Analytics data cited by CNBC.
How Polymarket compares to its rival Kalshi
Polymarket’s push for a higher valuation comes as its main competitor, Kalshi, has also been raising large sums. Kalshi closed a funding round in May that valued it at $22 billion, and the Financial Times reported in June that Kalshi was pursuing a further round in the third quarter targeting a $40 billion valuation. CNBC notes it has a commercial relationship with Kalshi, including a customer-acquisition partnership and a minority investment.
A different angle: betting on clinical trials
While Polymarket’s fundraising reflects the broader financial rise of prediction markets, a separate piece from The Guardian raises concerns about how that industry is expanding into new and more sensitive territory. Writer Joshua Pederson, whose 12-year-old son has been undergoing treatment for an aggressive tumor as part of a clinical trial, describes Kalshi’s plan to launch a pilot program letting users bet on the outcomes of FDA drug decisions and clinical trials. The first contracts under that pilot reportedly include bets on whether an anti-cancer drug will win approval and whether an Alzheimer’s drug trial will meet its goals.
Pederson writes that his son’s cancer returned months after being declared disease-free, and that the family enrolled him in a trial combining chemotherapy and immunotherapy after being told it offered the best odds among their limited options. He argues that allowing outside speculators to bet against the success of treatments that patients like his son are relying on for survival is troubling, even as Kalshi frames the effort differently.
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, quoted in the piece, described the initiative as a way of “surfacing information” through what the company calls a continuously updated public probability reflecting the actual weight of evidence rather than the messaging preferred by a trial’s sponsor. Mansour said drug development is one of the most information-constrained industries, and that data determining which drugs succeed is often inaccessible to the people who need it most. Pederson says he partly agrees that clinical trial information can be hard to access and evaluate — his own family struggled to choose among trial options — but rejects the idea that a betting market, rather than a patient’s medical team, should be the tool for making sense of that data.
Why these two stories sit together
Taken together, the two pieces show the same industry from two very different vantage points. One is a straightforward business story about capital: Polymarket chasing a valuation above $20 billion, Kalshi already there and aiming higher, and Wall Street players like ICE buying in directly. The other is a personal, ethical challenge to where that growth is heading, as prediction markets move beyond sports, elections and finance into pilot markets tied to medical trials and regulatory decisions that affect real patients. Neither source article addresses the other’s subject directly, but together they capture both the financial momentum behind prediction markets and the emerging controversy over how far their reach should extend.
Sources
Featured photo: Government of Thailand via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)