NEW YORK – A couple of years after dropping out of New York University with dreams of making it big in crypto, Shayne Coplan was so broke that he took an inventory of his Lower East Side apartment so that he could sell belongings to make rent.
Fed up with crypto grifts, in 2019 he started to explore economist Robin Hanson’s ideas on prediction markets and their potential for improving society’s ability to identify likely outcomes.
“This is too good of an idea to just exist in whitepapers,” he recalled thinking in a later post on X. Then Covid struck – the perfect time to develop an app for stuck-at-home folks to bet on real-world outcomes, he reasoned. He began building Polymarket from his bathroom and launched the platform in June 2020.
It wasn’t a smooth road. The company’s move-fast, ask-permission-later approach repeatedly ran afoul of regulators, who forced it to ban US-based users for years because it wasn’t a registered exchange. A week after the 2024 US presidential election – one that Polymarket users wagered more than US$3 billion (S$3.9 billion) on – Mr Coplan’s apartment was raided by FBI agents.
But he and his company are now riding high after Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest as much as US$2 billion in Polymarket at an US$8 billion pre-money valuation. That deal makes its 27-year-old founder the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Prediction markets like Polymarket allow users to bet on the outcomes of various events, like elections, whether the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates, or who Time magazine’s person of the year will be.
They are also becoming increasingly popular as a venue for wagering on sports. Because US prediction markets are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC), their proponents argue they sell financial products tied to the outcome of sporting events rather than sports bets, allowing them to skirt state-level bans on sports gambling. They’ve also been able to avoid certain US taxes applied to sports-wagering revenue.
In August, rival Kalshi began offering prediction-market bets through a partnership with Robinhood Markets. The electronic brokerage reported that more than 2 billion prediction contracts had traded in the third quarter.
Polymarket suffered a major setback in 2022, when it paid a US$1.4 million penalty to settle with the CFTC over allegations it was offering illegal trading. Without admitting or denying wrongdoing, the company agreed to block US-based users going forward.
But regulators suspected that Polymarket continued to host US users on the site, and in November, a week after Election Day, FBI agents raided Mr Coplan’s home before dawn and seized electronic devices.
The Justice Department and CFTC dropped their investigations in July. That same month, Polymarket acquired CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse QCEX for US$112 million, allowing it to resume US operations legally.
The company raised at least US$255 million before ICE’s investment, according to data tracked by Pitchbook. Investors include Peter Thiel and his Founders Fund, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and investment firm Blockchain Capital.
Another notable backer is 1789 Capital, which invested in Polymarket before the 2024 election and again this year. As part of that deal, Donald Trump Jr., President Donald Trump’s son and a partner at 1789, joined the company as an adviser in August. He also advises Kalshi.
The company’s ties to Washington could deepen with the ICE investment. ICE’s CEO, Jeffrey Sprecher, is married to Kelly Loeffler, a former senator who heads the Small Business Administration and is a member of Trump’s cabinet. BLOOMBERG
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