Can Prediction Markets Replace News? (No)
Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
June 09, 2025
Happy Monday, Defiers!
Today’s big story:
- The Polymarket, X partnership is big for crypto — but it’s not the future of news
Plus:
- Tokenized RWAs are up 260% this year
- Deutsche Bank is looking into stablecoins and tokenized deposits
- DeFi protocol Euler launches stablecoin lending infra
- SSV 2.0 and based applications: Decentralized infrastructure for secure, scalable Ethereum staking [SPONSORED]
Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.
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We’re back! Here’s what you need to know in web3 today
Polymarket + X Isn’t the Future of News
Polymarket and X announced a landmark partnership last week. The integration is rightly hailed as the triumph of a blockchain-based application that has properly gone mainstream. Yes, it’s the Trojan horse of crypto. Yes, it’s an inspiring story of perseverance. But, it is not the future of news.
Let’s start with the deal itself. X has named Polymarket its official prediction-market partner and also its first crypto partner. With the integration, Polymarket probabilities will be embedded directly into X users’ feeds.
Meanwhile, Polymarket’s real-time market odds will be paired with Grok AI annotations and relevant X posts, delivering what Polymarket’s founder calls “contextualized, data-driven insights” on breaking events, according to a press release on the partnership.
This is big for crypto. Polymarket is built end-to-end on Polygon, settles trades in USDC, and logs every bet on-chain via smart contracts. In 2024 alone, traders wagered over $8.5 billion across politics, sports, pop culture, and beyond. Now, these markets will surface to X’s roughly 550 million monthly active users.
But let’s pump the brakes on the hype. In its celebratory tweet, Polymarket proclaimed:
“The next information age won’t be driven by 20th-century media monoliths — it’ll be driven by markets. Our partnership with @X marks a new chapter for truth on the internet. The future of news is optimized for truth, rooted in transparency, and anchored in reality.”
That’s one grandiose statement.
Prediction markets offer highly accurate probabilities. And X provides an unparalleled feed of real-time information – whether it’s breaking news, analysis threads, or memecoin bots. But no algorithmic mashup between the two can replace professional journalism.
On the Polymarket Side
The leading prediction market’s strength lies in forecasting the outcomes of known events — elections, economic data releases, sports scores. But the world’s most consequential stories are often unknown until they’re broken — and interested parties want to keep it that way.
Corporate back-room deals, financial fraud, government corruption — those hidden threads require phone calls, subpoenas, and shoe-leather reporting. You won’t see markets related to those stories appear on Polymarket until after a journalist has exposed them.
On the X Side
Unfiltered X posts range from real-time scoops, company announcements, and well-researched threads, to wild rumors, phishing scams and conspiracy theories. Without rigorous editorial vetting, you risk amplifying the noise and inaccurate headlines, not clarifying the truth — especially when misinformation spreads faster than facts.
Also, where do you think many of the news headlines that X will feed to Polymarket come from? They come from journalists and media doing their job, and posting them on X!
Tech bros — from Balaji Srinivasan and Marc Andreessen to Elon Musk — have long been crowing about traditional media’s demise, dreaming about a time when “citizen journalists” and pure tech can replace reporters.
Yet, professional journalists still do the heavy lifting: cultivating confidential sources, filing Freedom of Information requests, poring over complex data sets, and rigorously fact-checking every claim.
I do agree with them on this: the legacy media model is dying. Subscription revenues are dwindling, and ad dollars incentivize volume and clickbait, leading to shrinking budgets for investigations. I do believe a new, markets-led model can fix this. But this X + Polymarket partnership is not it — at least not this alone.
Here’s the bottom line: X + Polymarket will offer a powerful new signal in the information ecosystem. But if this is the future of media, scammers and corrupt leaders will be delighted. The public will learn of a presidential candidate’s scandal only after it has already metastasized, long after Polymarket users have placed their bets on the election outcome.
With love,
Cami, founder of The Defiant
📈 Markets in the last 24 hrs:
| TICKER | VALUE | 24H | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Bitcoin | $107,800 | 1.70 % |
 | Ethereum | $2,537.82 | 0.85 % |
 | XRP | $2.26 | -0.99 % |
 | BNB | $656.74 | 0.80 % |
 | Solana | $154.75 | 2.66 % |
 MessariPortals | MINDSHARE Rank | MINDSHARE % Change (7d) |
|---|---|---|
 | MINDSHARE Rank | MINDSHARE % Change (7d) |
 Solana SOL | 6  | 41.55% |
 Avalanche AVAX | 20 | 28.95% |
 TRON TRX | 8  | -19.81% |
| Powered by Messari Portals | ||
This is the news that mattered in the past 24 hrs:
- The tokenized real-world asset (RWA) sector has grown 260% this year, from $8.6 billion at the beginning of the year to over $23 billion today, according to a recent report from Binance Research.
- Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, is actively exploring options for using stablecoins and integrating tokenized deposits, its head of digital assets and currencies transformation, Sabih Behzad, told Bloomberg.
- DeFi protocol Euler continues its comeback this year — after it suffered a hack in 2023 and relaunched last fall — with the launch of its stablecoin lending infrastructure, Frontier.
🎬WATCH
In the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, we spoke with Tomasz Stanczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. We discuss the evolution of Ethereum, the Foundation’s recent restructuring, and the focus on scaling Ethereum through L1 and L2 dynamics.
That’s it for today — if you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends! https://thedefiant.io/subscribe
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