October 8, 2025
Welcome to the Meridian Update, your daily on-chain report. It appears we are talking about ICE today? Oh, not that one.
Was there a prediction market on a prediction market raising money from the stock market?
We didn’t check. Anyway, from Polymarket:
“We are excited to announce that Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) — the parent company of @NYSE, is making a $2b strategic investment at a $9b post-money valuation.
Together, we’re building the next evolution of markets.
A special thank you to all those who have supported us till now.”
We haven’t talked about prediction markets on the Meridian Update. What do prediction markets have to do with on-chain? Glad you asked. Prediction markets can be built on-chain. For example, Polymarket uses USDC, one of the stablecoins we’ve talked a lot about, for its transactions. Polymarket is built on an Ethereum network layer 2, which should benefit from the Fusaka upgrade we talked about last week.
There’s a theory that says more things happening on-chain might not be the best thing for existing off-chain things. For example, you might think that more assets, like tokenized stocks, trading on-chain would be a bad thing for exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that dominate in trading of existing assets. But here you have a big off-chain player, NYSE’s parent company, investing in an on-chain player. Something to keep an eye on!
In any case, we’ll be watching what Polymarket does with this strategic investment.
Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs)
Speaking of platforms built on-chain, Grass announced it raised an additional $10M.
Grass is a decentralized bandwidth-sharing network. The idea is that just about everyone has home bandwidth from their internet service provider, but the vast majority do not use the maximum amount of that bandwidth. Grass says it is a way for users to earn rewards, which in this case are ultimately a token, GRASS, that trades on the Solana network. The GRASS token helps the system powering the Grass platform work.
Grass is an example of a company that exists off-chain, as in it is a company raising money from venture capital firms, to build something on-chain. That on-chain something includes a token used in the functionality of the company’s product. Grass is also an example of what many in the on-chain world call a DePIN, or a decentralized physical infrastructure network. That is, Grass works to pull together physical infrastructure, internet bandwidth, from many sources in many places. It is a decentralized physical infrastructure network.
There are other DePINs. We will talk about them as the news demands it.
That’s a wrap
It was a big day of fundraising for companies building on-chain, between a prediction market player and a decentralized physical infrastructure network.