The Breakdown - Polymarket’s $9B Comeback: Prediction Markets Return to the U.S.

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Polymarket is preparing to relaunch in the U.S. after years in regulatory exile, now armed with a CFTC-compliant license and a $9B valuation. The move signals a new era for prediction markets—blurring the line between crypto, sports betting, and social platforms. Plus: Visa’s stablecoin expansion, Western Union’s on-chain pivot, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink calls Bitcoin an “asset of fear.” Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, October 29th, and today we are talking about the return of Polly Market to the United States. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, Polymarket is preparing to return to the U.S. as soon as the end of next month. Bloomberg reports that the company is taking steps to relaunch in the U.S. with a focus on sports betting according to sources familiar with the plans.

The timing would allow their service to launch right as football heads into the postseason and basketball kicks up for the year. It has been a wild few years for this company. In the lead up to last year's election, Polymarket became a household name, providing a more accurate pulse on voter sentiment than mainstream polling. Shortly after the election, founder Shane Coplin had his house rated by the FBI, seemingly in connection to claims that Polymarket had somehow interfered with the election. More recently, Polymarket took on a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.

That investment valued Polymarket at $9 billion. This was all happening, meanwhile, while Polymarket was still technically banned from servicing U.S. users. In 2022, Polymarket settled a CFTC enforcement action, paying a $1.4 million fine and agreeing not to operate in the United States. In the middle of last year, the federal court limited the CFTC's jurisdiction over prediction markets, functionally making them legal for the first time and subject to similar rules as other derivatives platforms. Polymarket acquired a derivatives exchange for their license over the summer, while the CFTC formally withdrew any remaining investigations. It seems that everything has fallen in polymarkets' favor, and the platform is almost ready to relaunch in their home market.

relaunching as a sports betting platform is another interesting decision borne out by the way prediction markets have evolved over the past year. Traditionally, prediction markets have been focused on non-sports events. Elections have always been a big driver of volume as well as cultural events like the Oscars. There was a big assumption at the end of last year that the prediction markets had had their time in the sun with the presidential election. Many thought that they would go into hibernation for another four years with minimal volumes. That didn't turn out to be the case. The election had been a zeitgeist moment for prediction markets, with many praising the form of the form of as being more fair, transparent, and useful compared to typical one-sided betting platforms.

The court ruling that allowed prediction markets at the federal level also had a big role in popularizing the format. State regulators had been legalizing sports betting in the U.S. one-by-one over recent years, but there were still major holdouts. The prediction markets, however, have a federal regulatory framework that can override the states. Calshe is currently putting that theory to the test, suing New York's Gambling Commission earlier this week, claiming that they have no jurisdiction. The relaunch of Polymarket also comes as sports betting is under the spotlight and could face some major regulatory scrutiny. This week, the FBI filed charges against multiple figures in the NBA for fixing games, which will inevitably lead to a congressional

investigation. The folks on the All In podcast suggested that the Polymarket model could fix this issue. The NBA players were manipulating obscure prop bets on individual stats, which should show up clear as day in a market-based structure. Whether or not that's true, Polymarket will do well to reestablish themselves in the U.S. ahead of any crackdown on sports gambling. Crypto investor Guy Gaza commented, Prediction markets are gambling sites and pretending otherwise as ignorant. You'll see hefty legislation worldwide in the coming months and years because these markets can be highly sensitive to world events. There is approximately a 0% chance markets go unchecked indefinitely.

For the crypto industry, the return of polymarket is a very big deal. Arguably, prediction markets are one of the top handful of use cases for crypto networks. Polymarket in particular has been a big demonstration that obscuring a lot of the infrastructure has allowed a crypto app to gain mainstream popularity. And while there will be lots and lots of additional conversation around, the rise of gambling as a negative social trend, it seems pretty cat out of the baggish right now. Talley, a developer at Polymarket wrote, I still don't think that people understand that prediction markets are not a meta.

Prediction markets will be ingrained into the fabric of society. As if to demonstrate the point, Truth Social has announced plans to launch prediction markets in partnership with Crypto.com. The presidential social media platform has announced that they will cover elections, sports leagues, Fed decisions, and more. And they're not the only ones rushing to get a prediction market out the door. CME Group, which maintains the largest derivatives market in the U.S., is aiming to launch prediction markets by the end of the year. They'll do so under their partnership with Fanduil, who have so far

been one of the big losers from the rise of prediction markets. The truth social announcement is particularly interesting because of the crossover between social media platform and prediction market. Crypto.com CEO Chris Marsalik said, Prediction markets are poised to be a multi-decc-a-billion dollar industry. This aligns perfectly with what users look for in social media, a community to engage with and seek truth. Whatever you think of Truth Social doing this, you could easily also see other social media platforms trending in this direction. Elon Musk has made it clear numerous times that his end goal for X is to turn it into an everything app. That idea typically includes hosting stock and crypto trading on the platform,

but it wouldn't be hard to imagine that idea extending to predictions. All of it might be just another sign that we are fully in the world of casino capitalism, but with the president now having his own prediction markets, you can bet they're not going away anytime soon. Legacy internet and infrastructure are brittle. plagued by downtime, coverage gaps, and outdated financing models. Communities and builders are left behind while capital sits locked out. Althea is changing that. Since 2018, their technology has powered resilient, sustainable networks across the U.S. and abroad.

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of crypto networks, Visa has announced a huge expansion of their stablecoin strategy. During Tuesday's earnings called Visa's CEO Ryan McEnerny said, we are adding support for four stablecoins, running on four unique blockchains representing two currencies that we accept and convert to over 25 traditional fiat currencies. He wasn't clear about any of the details, but this is a large expansion, however you slice it. It's also clear that massive demand is showing up for Visa. In the past quarter, they saw spending on stable coin-linked cards quadruple compared to volumes from last year. McInerney mentioned that Visa now has 130 different stable-coin-linked cards operating in over 40 countries. He further boasted that

Visa has now facilitated over 140 billion in crypto and stablecoin flows since they first entered the space in 2020. In addition, Visa is now allowing banks to mint and burn stablecoins through their infrastructure. In a very real way, then, Visa is turning themselves into a stablecoin processing company rather than getting disrupted by the new technology. Anatoly Yaakovenko, the co-founder of Salana Labs, tweeted, why didn't stablecoins just organically disrupt Visa and stripe in every payments processor? Because the interface with the customer is the key. In my opinion, banking overhead is going to compress, payments processors that have a strong customer relationship will earn more, and those customers

will pay less. Now, following on from rumors earlier in the week, Western Union has announced plans to launch their own Stablecoin. In Tuesday's earnings call, Western Union disclosed that they're already seeing a ton of crypto adoption among their customers. Digital wallets and account-based payouts now make up over 50% of Western Union's digital transactions. The stable coin is set to be launched next year on Solana through a partnership with Anchorage Digital. While Western Union has been dabbling with crypto integrations for years, CEO Devin McGrathand said the passage of the Genius Act had inspired the company to take the plunge and issue their own stablecoin. Eleanor Territ, the host of crypto in America, tweeted, Western Union's business model is what

stablecoins were built to disrupt. Now Western Union is launching a stable coin to disrupt itself. Staying on the stable coin theme, Circle has launched the public testnet for Arc, their layer one blockchain network. Circle referred to the rollout as the economic operating system for the internet. The test net involves participation from 100 major players including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Visa, MasterCard, and State Street. CEO Jeremy Aller said, with ARC's public test net, we're seeing remarkable early momentum as leading companies, protocols, and projects begin to build and test. Combined, these companies reach billions of users, move, exchange, and custody hundreds of trillions in assets and payments. Now, when ARC was first announced, you might remember that the general reaction was a sense of betrayal. Many felt that Circles should be operating on top of the existing public blockchains rather than splitting

off to launch their own chain. There was a lot of hand-wringing around the idea of permission chains that undermine the core tenants of the industry. The countertake was that large financial institutions need the ability to operate on a compliance-enabled network, so the crypto-native chains never be able to attract critical mass. It's still days zero for ARC, but the strength of the launch partnerships suggests that Circle is tapping into some latent demand. The other interesting factor is that Circle can do things that are impossible on the other chains. Last week, nearer Jagrawal, the comms director for Coin Center asked, who is making stable coins private, to which Jeremy Allaire responded, Circle is building this on Arc. A little market news, asset tokenization

firm Securitize is set to go public via SPAC. Securitize is one of the largest tokenization partners around, having put more than $4 billion in real-world assets on chain. Most notably, they partnered with BlackRock on the Biddle tokenized Treasury Fund, which now exceeds a billion dollars. Securitized CEO Carlos Domingo said, this is a defining moment for securitize and for the future of finance. We founded this company with a mission to democratize capital markets by making them more accessible, transparent, and efficient through tokenization. This is the next chapter in making financial markets operate at the speed of the internet and another step in our mission to bring the next generation of finance on chain and tokenize the world. The deal will value the company

at $1.25 billion, and as a SPAC, it should come to market relatively quickly. Staying in markets, the Tuesday launch of the Bitwise Solana ETF saw some relatively solid returns. The fund received a $223 million seed investment ahead of listing and managed to add $69 million worth of inflows across the first day. By comparison, the first day of the Ethereum ETF saw 106 million of net inflows across the nine funds, while the first day of the Bitcoin ETF saw $655 million come in. Nate Garassi, the president of Novodias Wealth, noted that crypto ETFs are a massive outlier, tweeting, tweeting, bitwise spot sole ETF posts highest day one trading volume out of some 850 ETF launches this year.

He viewed this as strong demand and expects a similar result for other top 10 crypto ETFs to be launched later in the year. K33's head of research, Velte Lunday, isn't so optimistic. He wrote, no BlackRock, no party. BlackRock is absent from the imminent all-coin ETF wave. Opportunity for competitors to secure strong flows, but on net, likely limiting for overall flows. Speaking of BlackRock closing us out today, BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, reinforced his view of Bitcoin as a risk-off asset.

Speaking at an investment conference in Riyadh, he said investors are flocking to gold in Bitcoin because they're worried about government debt levels around the world. Fink commented, owning crypto assets or gold are assets of fear. You own these assets because you're frightened of the debaseous. of your assets. You're worried about your financial security. You're worried about your physical security. Fing's comments come as gold takes a breather from one of its largest rallies in decades. Prices have tumbled by 8% over the past week, but it's difficult to call this a crash, given how far they've climbed. Meanwhile, many Bitcoiners are looking for a catch-up trade to

begin. Fink mentioning Bitcoin in the same breath as gold to a room full of wealthy investors in Saudi Arabia could be a reason to hold on to hope. Turning to the other half of his crypto pitch, Fink said, we're not spending enough time talking about how quickly we're going to tokenize every financial asset. I think that's going to happen worldwide very rapidly, and I think most countries are ill-prepared for that and underappreciate how technology is changing that. Still, things, comments about the assets of fear were the most resonant. Although the debasement trade might be cooling off, it is still top of mind for the head of the

largest investment management firm in the world. That's going to do it for today's breakdown. Appreciate you listening, as always, and until next time, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.