GRID supplies official esports data and streams to Polymarket

Official match data, the live feed that comes out of the game server while a match is played, is now going to a prediction market. GRID, the company that distributes that data for several publishers and tournament organizers, published on Tuesday, June 23, 2026 the announcement of a partnership with Polymarket, a prediction market platform. The release carries the dateline New York, June 21.

Under the agreement GRID supplies three things to an esports hub on Polymarket's platform: official esports data, data visualization and live streaming of matches. The release gives no financial terms and no duration. It says the partnership is already live, and that it was launched just in time for three events: the IEM Cologne Major in Counter-Strike 2, Valorant Masters London and the Mid-Season Invitational in League of Legends.

When GRID announced its agreement with ESL FACEIT Group in July 2025, the recipients of official data it named were fans, media, sportsbooks and other partners. A prediction market is a different kind of recipient, and the release presents the arrangement as available in this form only on Polymarket.

What the agreement covers

The release describes a single place on Polymarket where a user can follow matches as they unfold, see live information and engage with markets without leaving the platform. GRID provides the parts that make that possible.

The data, GRID says, comes directly from game servers, through official partnerships with game publishers and tournament organizers. The release names none of those rights holders. The live streams are described as free of advertising and of interruptions, which the release contrasts with the public streams of the same events on the usual streaming sites. The release also lists interactive widgets.

The two companies make several claims for the arrangement. They say that faster and more accurate information allows a wider range of markets and faster settlement. They also present Polymarket as the only prediction exchange that offers this complete setup in one place. These are the companies' statements about their own product; the release gives no measurement, for latency or for anything else.

Two executives speak for the deal in the release: Ari Borod, president of sports business development at Polymarket, and Moritz Maurer, chief executive of GRID. Borod's argument is that esports markets have to move as fast as the matches; Maurer's is that trading depends on fast, reliable information.

Where official data comes from

The clearest description of how GRID obtains what it distributes is in an earlier release. On July 30, 2025, GRID and ESL FACEIT Group, the company behind the ESL, FACEIT and DreamHack brands, announced an exclusive, multi-year partnership for the distribution of match data. It made GRID the exclusive distributor, infrastructure provider and integrity partner for live match data from every Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 competition that ESL FACEIT Group operates. Intel Extreme Masters, ESL Pro League and ESL One were named.

That agreement started at once, with IEM Cologne. It covered official live data feeds for fans, media, sportsbooks and other partners, and audio-video feeds and visualizations for betting and media companies. Neither the number of years nor the value was disclosed. The release introduced the event with figures attributed to Esports Charts: a prize pool of US$1.25 million, more than one million concurrent viewers and 25.5 million hours watched in 2024.

In the same document GRID listed Riot Games, Ubisoft, KRAFTON and BLAST among the rights holders and data users that trust it. The chain in the ESL FACEIT Group case is plain. The organizer runs the competitions and holds their data. It appointed one distributor. The distributor passes the feeds on to media, sportsbooks and other partners.

The rule Riot Games set for betting partners

For some companies the official feed is a matter of rules. Riot Games, the publisher of League of Legends and Valorant, made official data a condition when it opened betting sponsorships to its top-tier teams in the Americas and in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In a text published on June 26, 2025 and signed by John Needham, its president of publishing and esports, Riot said that betting partners must use GRID to power what they offer. It recalled that it had formed a global partnership with GRID and invested in the company in 2023.

The same text set limits. Riot must vet and approve each betting partner before a team can sign it. Teams must build an internal integrity program. Riot's own broadcast and social channels stay free of betting: no advertisements, no sponsored segments and no betting logos on team jerseys. Riot also gave a measure of the market it was responding to, citing Sportradar: US$10.7 billion in global betting turnover on its League of Legends and Valorant competitions in 2024.

That text is about betting companies. It does not mention prediction markets, and GRID's release of June 23 does not say which publisher's or organizer's data reaches Polymarket under the new agreement.

From sponsor to data partner

The data agreement follows two esports sponsorships that Polymarket announced earlier in 2026. This time it receives a service where before it bought visibility. The release describes Polymarket as a prediction market platform whose subjects run from politics and economics to sports and culture.

The Esports Advocate reported the first on February 10. BLAST named Polymarket its official prediction partner for the rest of 2026, across seven of its events in Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, starting with BLAST Slam VI, a Dota 2 tournament played in Malta from February 3 to 15. The report named Rotterdam, Fort Worth and Hong Kong among the stops concerned. The sponsor received custom content in broadcasts and desk segments, visibility in arenas and digital content, an on-site fan experience carrying its name and streaming booths for creators at arena events.

The second came from a team. On March 25, SINNERS Esports, a Czech Counter-Strike 2 organization, announced Polymarket as its official prediction market partner; Dot Esports described it the next day as the platform's first sponsorship of an esports team, and listed its agreements in traditional sport, among them an exclusive multi-year deal with Major League Baseball signed in March 2026.

The events behind the timing

The three events the release names fall between June 2 and July 12. The IEM Cologne Major ran from June 2 to 21 with a prize pool of US$1.25 million. Its final, in which Falcons beat FURIA 3-0 on June 21, peaked at 2,751,121 viewers according to Esports Charts, as HLTV reported. Valorant Masters London was played from June 6 to 21 at the Copper Box Arena with 12 teams. The Mid-Season Invitational, Riot Games' mid-year international tournament in League of Legends, begins on June 28 in Daejeon, South Korea, with 11 teams, and ends on July 12.

By the date printed on GRID's page, two of the three events had just finished and the third was five days away.

How large the market already is

No figure is published for esports trading on Polymarket in the release. A detailed public count for the period exists for another platform. On June 11, Esports Insider published a breakdown, drawn from the programming interface of the prediction market operator Kalshi, of the contracts traded on esports match results there between June 1 and 7, 2026: about US$36 million in one week.

Counter-Strike 2 took about two thirds of that week, and Esports Insider traced it to one tournament: all ten of the largest Counter-Strike markets were matches of the IEM Cologne Major. League of Legends volume was spread over 116 matches in several leagues. Valorant's came from 13 matches and Dota 2's from 11, nearly all of them at BLAST Slam VII.

The author added a caution that bears directly on what GRID distributes. There could be debate, he wrote, over whether that volume is fans trading or automated programs exploiting the delay in esports data. GRID's release, for its part, presents data taken directly from game servers as the fastest and most accurate source of information.

What the sources leave open

GRID's release announces no further step: no list of competitions, no date for an extension, no second partner of the same kind. The dates that are known belong to others. The Mid-Season Invitational runs from June 28 to July 12, and BLAST's agreement with Polymarket covers its events until the end of the year.

Riot Games' position on prediction markets is not stated in any of these documents, and neither is Valve's. For the moment the record is three announcements since February, and none with a price attached.

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