Polymarket Partners with Nasdaq for Company Contracts
BITmarkets Team
May 21, 2026
The new product, announced Tuesday, was developed in collaboration with Nasdaq Private Market, a platform specializing in secondary trading for privately held company shares. Nasdaq Private Market will provide both the underlying data and market infrastructure supporting these contracts.
The prediction markets are designed around events involving startups and late-stage private companies, including fundraising rounds, valuation changes, and other corporate developments. The launch broadens Polymarket’s offerings beyond traditional categories such as politics, macroeconomic events, and publicly traded companies.
Prediction markets move deeper into private capital
The expansion reflects Polymarket’s broader effort to attract more financially focused users while extending prediction markets into private capital markets, where access to pricing information is often restricted. According to the platform, growing interest in so-called unicorns — privately held startups valued at more than $1 billion — has increased demand for forecasting tools tied to private companies.
Polymarket noted that there are currently nearly 1,600 unicorns globally, with a combined valuation exceeding $5 trillion, despite investment access remaining largely limited to private market participants.
Institutional interest in prediction markets continues to grow
The partnership with Nasdaq Private Market also highlights increasing institutional engagement with prediction markets as event-driven contracts and private company data gain attention from professional investors. Despite this trend, retail users continue to dominate activity. A recent report from Bitget Wallet and Polymarket found that retail traders accounted for approximately 80% of prediction market volume.
Wall Street analysts have suggested institutional participation could continue increasing as regulatory conditions in the United States become more supportive and market infrastructure evolves.
Research firm Bernstein recently identified the first institutional block trade on Kalshi as a significant milestone for the sector. Block trades are privately negotiated transactions, typically used by large investors to move substantial positions without significantly affecting broader market pricing.
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