Polymarket

Shayne Coplan was born in 1998 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. At 14, after reading Michael Lewis's Flash Boys, he emailed the SEC about high-frequency trading practices. He started at NYU but dropped out to pursue crypto full-time — having bought Ethereum tokens at $0.30 per coin in 2014, years before most people had heard of it. In early 2020, Coplan pivoted a DeFi project called Union Market to focus entirely on prediction markets. Working alone from what he described as a converted bathroom in his Lower East Side apartment, he built Polymarket and launched it in June 2020 at age 22. The premise: require users to put their money where their mouth is, turning opinions into financially backed forecasts.

Polymarket gained early traction during the 2020 US presidential election by correctly signalling Joe Biden's victory weeks before Election Day, when major pollsters were showing a much closer race. The platform operated on the Polygon (Ethereum) network with transactions denominated in USDC stablecoin — a design that enabled lower-cost, faster transactions than competitors. In January 2022, the CFTC fined Polymarket $1.4 million for operating without proper registration and issued a cease-and-desist order. Polymarket settled, blocked US users, and appointed former CFTC Commissioner J. Christopher Giancarlo as chairman of its advisory board.

By the 2024 US presidential election, Polymarket had become the world's most liquid prediction market. Over $3.3 billion was wagered on the presidential race between Trump and Harris — more than the GDP of some small countries. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had backed the platform. Just days after the election — which Polymarket had correctly predicted — federal agents raided Coplan's Manhattan apartment, seizing his phone and electronics as part of an FBI investigation into whether Polymarket had illegally allowed US users to bet on the election. Coplan quipped "New phone, who dis?" on social media. No charges were filed. By July 2025, both the DOJ and CFTC had dropped their investigations.

In October 2025, Intercontinental Exchange — the Fortune 500 company that owns the New York Stock Exchange — announced an investment of up to $2 billion in Polymarket for a minority stake, valuing the company at $9 billion pre-money. The first tranche instantly made Coplan, at 27, one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world. ICE also agreed to package Polymarket's market data for institutional clients. The world's largest traditional exchange operator was betting that event-based trading was a durable financial category — not a speculative fad. Polymarket acquired QCEX, a CFTC-licensed exchange, to build a path back into the US market.

Polymarket raised a further $600 million from ICE in March 2026, valuing the company at approximately $15 billion. A US-only platform relaunched in December 2025 and dropped its waitlist in May 2026. The international platform had become the world's real-time information aggregator for geopolitical events: wars, elections, economic data, and cultural moments traded simultaneously across 70+ countries. Instances of suspicious insider trading — including on Iran war events in early 2026 — raised serious ethical questions the platform was still working to resolve. The 22-year-old who had built Polymarket alone in a converted bathroom had created a new category of financial market.