Traditional American exchanges are starting to panic. The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, has invested $2 billion in the prediction market Polymarket. What is behind this move?

In short, traditional financial exchanges are having a tough time:

**Severe Market Fragmentation** — The NYSE's market share is only 19.7%, overtaken by NASDAQ. All newly listed companies choose NASDAQ, causing the NYSE to lose its growth engine. Moreover, from 2000 to now, the market share of traditional exchanges has fallen from 95% to 30%, fragmented by dark pools and small exchanges.

**High-profit businesses are also failing** — Once profitable data businesses are also declining, with the growth rate of financial data subscriptions approaching zero.

**Why is Polymarket worth 2 billion?** It has something traditional finance doesn't have - high predictive accuracy. During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Polymarket's prediction data accuracy reached 85%, while the economists' consensus was only 20%, a difference of 65 percentage points. This is the power of "crowd wisdom": participants bet real money, incentivizing them to analyze information seriously.

ICE's ambition is to package Polymarket data as financial products to sell to institutional clients—hedge funds, investment banks, and central banks all need it. In this era full of uncertainty, mastering future data means mastering pricing power.

**Essentially, traditional exchanges are saving themselves** — the old model is no longer profitable, so they can only expand into new areas.