Crypto.com Breaks Things Off With Truth Social on Prediction Markets
Truth Predict is dead, and that was probably the right move for all parties. It was the prediction market platform that was going to live inside Truth Social.
The plan for the platform to allow users to trade event contracts alongside their political content has been quietly abandoned. Trump Media and Crypto.com confirmed Friday that they are unwinding their partnership, ending plans for the CRO token treasury company, ETF arrangements, and the Truth Social prediction market integration.
The official explanations are careful. Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the proposed deals “don’t make sense under current market conditions.” Trump Media CEO Eddy McGurn told Axios the prediction market business is already crowded with established companies, making the back-end infrastructure a less attractive use of resources. He sees more opportunity for Truth Social as a distribution and data partner than as an operator of the underlying markets.
That last line is the one worth holding onto. A company that was going to build prediction markets is now saying it would rather sell access to its data to the people building prediction markets. That is not a minor strategic pivot. It is an admission that the infrastructure play was the wrong one.
Crypto.com Got the Better End of This
From Crypto.com’s perspective, the breakup is barely a story, and they have to be loving their current position. The exchange has more valuable prediction market partnerships than Truth Social was ever going to have. FanDuel Predicts just moved all sports and novelty contracts to Crypto.com, as we covered in the Q2 earnings roundup. Crypto.com also has deals with Fanatics and, reportedly, is in conversations with Robinhood. Its own consumer-facing prediction market, OG, launched earlier this year.
Truth Social, for all its political reach, has an audience that skews toward a demographic less associated with active trading than the crypto-native and sports betting users who have driven prediction market growth. Crypto.com’s other partners are bringing it volume. The Truth Social deal was always more about brand association than market depth.
CRO fell as much as 5% after the news broke. That is the market’s assessment of how much the Trump Media partnership was worth to Crypto.com’s token price. Not very much, it turns out.
The Trump Family Connection Gets More Complicated
The failed Truth Social prediction market deal sits alongside the Trump family’s existing, more durable relationships with the two dominant platforms in the space. Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, having invested in the latter through his firm 1789 Capital. He also sits on Trump Media’s board and serves as the sole trustee of his father’s 41% stake in the company.
So the Trump family simultaneously holds advisory and investment positions in Kalshi and Polymarket, sits atop the company that just abandoned its own prediction market product, and controls a social media platform that is now positioning itself as a data licensing business to trading firms. McGurn confirmed Truth Social’s API business, which sells real-time post access to high-frequency trading firms, now has about ten customers.
That is the Truth API product we covered in our piece on Truth Social’s paid early access service last month, and what we noted then still holds: selling millisecond-faster access to presidential posts to algorithmic traders, while the president’s son advises the platforms those traders use, is a set of relationships that the CFTC has not yet addressed publicly. The failure of Truth Predict does not simplify that picture. It just removes one element from it.
Where the Prediction Market Traffic Goes Now
Truth Social was never going to be a major prediction market venue. Its user base is real but is extremely niche. The platform’s content is political, and while political markets are popular on Kalshi and Polymarket, they represent a fraction of overall volume. The infrastructure investment required to build a functional prediction market exchange was always a poor fit for a media company trying to monetize audience reach.
McGurn’s reframe, distribution partner rather than operator, is the smarter play here. Truth Social’s audience and data can drive traffic to established platforms without requiring Trump Media to build compliance infrastructure, manage settlement disputes, or navigate the regulatory fights currently running in seven federal circuits. The company gets the upside of prediction market association without the operational and legal burden.
Kalshi and Polymarket are presumably the most natural beneficiaries. Both have Trump family connections, and both have the product. Neither needs to share revenue with a media company to reach Truth Social’s audience when that audience is already using their platforms. The question of whether a formal distribution arrangement with Truth Social ever materializes, or whether the existing relationships between the Trump family and both platforms are sufficient, is now back on the table.
Truth Predict never launched. The Crypto.com partnership is over. Prediction markets on Truth Social, as a product, are finished. As a business relationship, the story has a few more chapters.
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