Betting marketplace Polymarket and AI search engine Perplexity partner on info-sharing deal

AI search engine Perplexity will now display results from Polymarket as part of a partnership with the dominant blockchain-based betting market. The news signals how prediction marketplaces — until just recently relegated to the realm of academic theory — are becoming a part of how people consume and make sense of news events.

Polymarket will likewise integrate search results from the VC-backed AI platform on its site, including summaries of news stories and a search box for users to ask follow-up questions. The Polygon-based betting market is also using Perplexity Pages, a feature that enables users to share their chatbot queries as a webpage.

One of a few live crypto-AI tie-ups, the partnership represents the growing role prediction markets and artificial intelligence have in media. Platforms like Polymarket are a way of crowdsourcing predictions about real-world events and theoretically give a less biased view as users are motivated to share honest opinions by putting money on the line.

Would-be U.S. users are geo-blocked from Polymarket, which was fined by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2022 for providing unlicensed binary, “yes/no,” options contracts. As The Block reported last week, several Democratic lawmakers in Washington are pressuring the CFTC to ban political events contracts completely. 

Polymarket saw over $387 million in trading volume in July, its highest-volume month by far, according to The Block’s data page. The platform is increasingly being referenced by news sites like the Wall Street Journal and even former presidents, especially regarding markets related to U.S. elections.

Polymarket last month announced a similar partnership with Substack, which lets authors embed prediction data in their articles, as well as news that political analyst Nate Silver joined the firm as an advisor.