Intercontinental Exchange Chair and CEO Jeffrey Sprecher Talks Crypto Rules

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Tyler Kendall** (0:07)
I'm Tyler Kendall here at the CFTC, and I'm joined now by the chair and CEO of the Intercontinental Exchange, Jeff Sprecher. Mr. Sprecher, thank you so much for joining us here on Bloomberg. And you were there at the White House yesterday. I saw you there with President Trump for this event, where he was really trying to push for the passage of the Clarity Act. I'm wondering if you can outline for me, what would passage of clarity unlock for you?

**Jeff Sprecher** (0:31)
Well, one of two things, it would obviously provide legal certainty for areas that are now somewhat undefined. But notwithstanding what the Congress is doing, we have been moving forward to try to tokenize the New York Stock Exchange, to try to extend its hours, to try to change its pricing model under conventional laws so that we have a parallel track going on in order to move our business forward.

**Tyler Kendall** (0:56)
Can you give us updates on those tokenization efforts?

**Jeff Sprecher** (0:58)
It's with the SEC right now and it's making progress. This particular SEC wants to not stifle innovation.
It's got a more challenging rule set to deal with without the Clarity Act, but notwithstanding, there is a process there for innovation exemptions.

**Tyler Kendall** (1:18)
The other side of this remit, of course, is prediction markets. I found this quote from you. You've described prediction markets as having real economic utility. Do you see ICE eventually listing its own event contracts, or is this purely about that data layer, owning that, like with Polymarket, and then letting those platforms do the prediction markets?

**Jeff Sprecher** (1:39)
A bit of both. We've long had markets where you're asking market participants, where do you think an index will settle, which in a way is a prediction market.
And historically, those have been very obvious indexes that define an industry. What the prediction markets have done is really drill down on very, very minor, minute, localized ideas. And I think that works better for those people because it's just a constant listing and delisting of contracts, which is really not how my universe, Wall Street, operates.

**Tyler Kendall** (2:19)
Can you give us an update on your relationship with Polymarket and just how it's going?

**Jeff Sprecher** (2:25)
Sure. We have a great relationship. We are an investor in it. And we partly invested in it because we were interested in their technology. They are truly a blockchain based system. And we were hoping for technology transfer, which they've been helping us with. And at the same time, they had regulatory issues. They really needed to get to compliance in the United States. And we're long versed in how to do that. And so there's been this mutual transfer of information. We're not a venture capital firm. We put money into it simply so that we had connectivity with them.
And in that regard, the investment itself has done well.
But it's really this underlying exchange of information that we are working on.

**Tyler Kendall** (3:10)
Okay, so that might answer my next question because Polymarket is looking to raise capital at a $20 billion valuation. So I was wondering if you were going to add to your stake or keep it capped at, I think, $1.6 billion.

**Jeff Sprecher** (3:21)
Yes, we're in at $1.6 billion. We'll look at it.
If it will help the round in order to have our impritour on it. We always are interested. We've done two rounds with them. But the reality is we're not a venture firm. We're really here to have this transfer of information and expertise.

**Tyler Kendall** (3:39)
I did want to ask you, because you're looking at creating a futures market when it comes to AI compute power. Why do you think that this is the right financial tool for lenders or these tech companies in the AI space to hedge against their costs?

**Jeff Sprecher** (3:53)
It's a good question. First of all, the CFTC is going to do a broad information gathering about that very question to see where the whole industry is, which will be interesting. We are the world's electricity market. I actually started the company to be an electricity exchange, so it's in our DNA.
And if you think about compute today, it's electricity and possibly chips on the input and then on the output to these things called tokens, which is basically the way you pay for compute. And so somewhere in that amalgamation, I suspect is going to be trading and risk transfer, whether it's buying the inputs to the power plant and data center or whether it's buying the output, how the models work, I think is something that we'll discover with this inquiry.