This issue reviews X's cooperation with the decentralized prediction market Polymarket for reference.
Elon Musk's social platform X (formerly Twitter) announced a major cooperation on June 6, 2025: officially becoming an official partner with the decentralized prediction market Polymarket. This move not only embeds cryptocurrency-driven prediction tools into a social platform with more than 400 million users, but also marks the substantive stage of the integration of the two major ecosystems of Web2 and Web3. When the attention economy of social media meets the financial game of blockchain, a revolution that reshapes the way information is produced and consumed has quietly begun.
The core of this cooperation lies in technology integration and data collaboration. According to the agreement, Polymarket's prediction market will be deeply integrated into X's social ecosystem, and users can directly use cryptocurrencies (mainly USDC of the Polygon network) on the X platform to bet on global events - covering a wide range of topics such as political elections, sports events, and economic trends. More importantly, Grok, an AI chatbot developed by Musk's xAI, will play the role of a "nerve center", analyzing the massive conversation content of the X platform in real time, converting it into market insights, and dynamically combining it with Polymarket's predicted probability to generate contextual decision-making suggestions for users.
Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan commented: "The two major truth-finding applications on the Internet have joined forces. The news of the future will be fact-oriented, transparent, and anchored by reality." This vision directly addresses the pain points of traditional media: editorial bias, advertising pressure, and lack of credibility caused by political stance. The advantage of the prediction market lies in the use of "real money" to form a consensus - users need to invest money to express their views, and the market results are ensured by the decentralized oracle UMA to be tamper-proof, thereby generating a probability prediction that is closer to the truth.
Musk publicly stated before the 2024 election: "Polymarket data is more accurate than polls because it involves real money investment." This statement laid the groundwork for their cooperation today.
The cooperation between Polymarket and X is not an isolated case, but a microcosm of the general trend of embedding Web3 functions in Web2 platforms. Its evolution logic presents three major characteristics:
Migration of traffic entrances: Users no longer need to operate across platforms. Mobius Development Kit (MDS) similar to Axelar already supports triggering cross-chain transactions by sending messages in Telegram or WeChat, such as transferring ETH from Ethereum to the Arbitrum network, or automatically providing liquidity in the DeFi protocol. Social scenarios and financial operations are seamlessly connected, greatly reducing the threshold for using Web3.
Penetration of trust mechanism: Traditional Web2 services rely on centralized cloud architecture (such as AWS), which has single point failure and censorship risks. The Active Verification Service (AVS) proposed by EigenLayer innovatively introduces Ethereum's cryptoeconomic security into off-chain computing. For example, the decentralized "watchtower" network can verify the server location, and the distributed nodes manage biometric private keys, injecting the trust core of Web3 while retaining the efficiency of Web2.
Decoupling of identity and assets: Web2 users can manage on-chain assets without understanding mnemonics or gas fees. Particle Network's zero-knowledge proof wallet service (zkWaaS) allows users to interact with DApps through temporary addresses, and confidential identity authentication ensures privacy while achieving a smooth experience of "social account as wallet". This "Web2.5" form is becoming the mainstream entrance for incremental users.
The user experience of traditional social media is essentially one-way information consumption, while the embedding of Web3 components is triggering a triple experience upgrade:
Financialization of information interaction: X users can no longer just "forward" news, but can also bet on the outcome of events through Polymarket. For example, a tweet about the Fed's interest rate hike may be accompanied by market data of "65% probability of interest rate hike", and users can directly buy "yes/no" contracts. This sense of participation in voting with funds significantly improves stickiness and stay time.
Smart Decision-making: Grok's real-time analysis of social sentiment can transform fragmented views into structured signals. For example, when negative discussions about a certain technology product suddenly emerge on X, Grok can instantly generate insights such as "the probability of the company's quarterly revenue falling short of expectations has increased" to assist users in adjusting their forecast positions. Social data becomes the input source of quantitative models, realizing a closed loop "from chat room to trading desk."
Seamless Asset Circulation: Through Magic Labs' embedded wallet technology, Polymarket users can use X accounts to directly host on-chain assets without downloading plug-ins or recording mnemonics. USDC recharges, contract transactions, and income withdrawals can be completed within the X interface, providing an experience close to Web2 payment tools, but with on-chain transparency.
According to ThunderBit statistics, the average daily usage time of X users exceeds 11 minutes, of which 59% of users use X as their main source of news. Financialization functions are expected to increase this time to more than 20 minutes.
This convergence trend has opened up a new battlefield for enterprises in different fields:
Traditional social/content platforms: They can follow X’s example and open up a second revenue curve by integrating prediction markets or NFT functions. For example, Substack has allowed authors to embed Polymarket prediction boxes in their communications, turning readers into participants; Reddit's "Community Points" attempts to tokenize Karma values and build an internal economic system.
Blockchain infrastructure providers: Tools such as Axelar MDS are becoming the "middleware" for Web2 platforms to access Web3. Its API interface supports applications such as WeChat and Telegram to directly call cross-chain protocols, and developers can give users on-chain interaction capabilities without rewriting the backend. Similarly, Safe's smart account system provides custody solutions for exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance to reduce compliance risks.
AIand data service providers: xAI's cooperation with Kalshi has proved that AI models + prediction data can form a closed business loop. In the future, there may be professional "social sentiment analysis services", such as sentiment scoring of topic X and outputting it to the DeFi interest rate agreement to achieve "speech influence pricing".
Regulatory technology companies: The case of Polymarket being fined $1.4 million by the CFTC for not registering as a DCM shows that compliance transformation is a key prerequisite for integration. It is necessary to develop on-chain KYC modules (such as dynamic zero-knowledge proof credentials) or transaction monitoring systems to meet regulatory requirements under a decentralized framework.
Despite the broad prospects, the integration of Web2 and Web3 still faces structural obstacles:Regulatory uncertainty,The US SEC has different opinions on the characterization of prediction markets, and some states regard them as gambling rather than financial instruments.User experience is fragmented,Gas fee fluctuations, cross-chain delays and other issues still hinder novice users.Ecosystem fragmentation,Polymarket needs to rely on UMA oracles, while other DApps may choose Chainlink, and data islands are difficult to connect.
The breakthroughs in the next three years may be: AIdriven chain abstraction,such as the SwanChain project trying to use AI agents to automatically select the optimal chain and route, and users only need to focus on the operation goals;
Compliance framework innovation,drawing on the "sandbox supervision" of the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission to set capital and subject matter limits for the prediction market;token economy reconstruction,Polycule and other ecological projects are exploring the "transaction mining + copy trading sharing" model to feed back the platform growth dividends to early users.
Just as the AVS architecture integrates Web2 scale and Web3 trust, the next generation of the Internet will no longer have the boundaries between Web2 and Web3, but only a digital ecosystem where users are unaware and value flows freely.
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