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.
