X, the social media platform still colloquially known as Twitter, is bypassing customers in the United States with latest partner Polymarket.
That is because Polymarket is not licensed to operate in the US. The brand may be well known to those familiar with predictions, but the regulator of such markets in the United States penalized Polymarket in 2022.
Polymarket has blocked US customers since then. Some US-based customers could use a VPN to continue making predictions for some time, but that was reportedly cracked down on leading up to the 2024 US elections.
The partnership will include an integrated product that “delivers data-driven insights and recommendations to Polymarket.” Live insights will include “real-time annotations explaining market moves directly from Grok and relevant X posts.”
What happened to Kalshi deal?
Kalshi announced a deal with X for AI integration last month. The only problem is that it seemed to be news to Elon Musk‘s platform.
The news, which ran on Bloomberg and was celebrated by Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on social media, was retracted the same day. According to Bloomberg, a Kalshi spokesperson said the “deals of the announcement had not been mutually confirmed.”
About two and a half weeks later, X partnered with Polymarket instead.
Of course, the Polymarket deal may still help Kalshi. X will give prediction markets exposure, which could lead US-based users to search out legal options once they get the pop-up saying the website is not available in the country.
Polymarket ‘ensures transparency’
“Polymarket ensures transparency through its prediction markets, and has grown into a staple source of real-time information for many X users,” said Linda Yaccarino. “We are pleased to partner with Polymarket and look forward to bringing their our data and technology to Polymarket users through a range of creative product integrations.”
Polymarket, meanwhile, said this is just the first of a “suite of integrations” that the two will jointly develop.
“Combining Polymarket’s accurate, unbiased, and real-time prediction market probabilities with Grok’s analysis and X’s real time insights will enable us to provide contextualized, data-driven insights to millions of Polymarket users around the world instantaneously,” said Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan.
