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Intercontinental Exchange (ICE +1.48%), parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, recently committed $2 billion to Polymarket. The headlines focused predictably on the elevation of Polymarket’s founder to the ranks of the young and wealthy. A curious spectacle, certainly. More significant, however, is the signal this sends: ICE acknowledges prediction market data as a legitimate asset class. It is a declaration, in effect, that the collective intelligence of these markets holds predictive power worthy of institutional capital.

Apparently, everyone else had a similar panic. Software stocks, the ones that were already teetering on the edge of “expensive,” took a bit of a tumble. Something about Anthropic’s Claude Code threatening to make Excel obsolete. Honestly, I can barely open Excel, so the idea of it being replaced feels… liberating. But the market, of course, doesn’t work like that.

Gemini. That’s the name. Their large language model. It’s consistently good, apparently. I mean, they all are, aren’t they? It’s become the baseline. But what Alphabet does is embed it. Everywhere. Cloud, search… it’s like they’re injecting intelligence into the bloodstream of the internet. And let’s be real, search is still king. They own the gateway, don’t they? Chrome, Android… over 70% market share. It’s not exactly a fair fight. And then there’s the Apple deal. They pay Alphabet to be the default search engine. Clever, really. It’s like a protection racket, but legal. And now Apple Intelligence is jumping on the Gemini bandwagon. Smooth move.

So, let us pit XRP against Ethereum, shall we? Both are promising much, and delivering… well, that’s another matter entirely. I rather suspect one offers a slightly more plausible return, though ‘plausible’ is a generous term, wouldn’t you agree?

The recent figures, of course, tell a story. A story of deceleration. Of revenue growth slowing to a pace that, while still positive, lacks the earlier exuberance. One observes the quarterly progression – 22% in Q4 2024, a brief uptick to 25% in Q1 2025, then a gradual descent – 19%, 18%, and finally, a mere 14% in the most recent quarter. It is a pattern that suggests not catastrophe, perhaps, but a quiet settling. A return to something resembling normalcy.

The narrative is that ServiceNow, with its workflow automation, is basically obsolete. That AI will just…do it better. It’s a lazy thought. And frankly, insulting to the people who actually built the thing. It’s like saying a plumber is redundant because someone invented a self-cleaning toilet. Yes, the toilet is clever, but it still needs pipes, doesn’t it? ServiceNow isn’t afraid of AI; it’s already integrated it. They’ve been quietly making things more efficient for ages. Customers aren’t looking to replace their systems; they want to enhance them. And guess who’s best positioned to handle that enhancement? Exactly. Bill McDermott, their CEO, put it brilliantly – AI doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It needs orchestration. It needs…well, ServiceNow. Which, let’s be honest, sounds a lot less scary than letting a rogue algorithm run your entire business.

Polymarket, that curious bazaar of predictive wagering, assigns a paltry 12% probability to such an outcome. A pessimistic assessment, certainly. But is it, perhaps, unduly so? One must consider the fifteen-year track record, a period during which Bitcoin has repeatedly confounded the expectations of the sensible, and occasionally, rewarded the faith of the utterly reckless.