Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan has built a $9bn empire on crypto bets

In November 2024, eight days after Donald Trump won the US presidential election, the FBI battered down the door of Shayne Coplan’s New York City apartment and seized his electronic devices. The raid was part of a criminal investigation into whether Coplan’s company, Polymarket, was allowing American users to place bets without a licence.

Less than a year later, in October 2025, Polymarket secured a $2bn investment from the owners of the New York Stock Exchange, valuing it at $9bn. Aged 27, Coplan became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. As part of the announcement, Polymarket’s name was emblazoned across the NYSE’s headquarters with the caption: “against all odds”. The company had been catapulted “from a write- off”, as Copland put it, into the heart of Wall Street.

Polymarket is a prediction market – platforms that allow punters to bet on practically anything, from the sartorial choices of Volodymyr Zelensky to the Oscars. They are surging in popularity, tapping into the intersection of viral social media trends, cryptocurrency and the seemingly endless appetite of contemporary online culture for gamifying every possible aspect of reality. In the last week of February, $2.4bn was wagered on the site, up from $1.8bn a week earlier.

A large chunk of this money is being staked on geopolitics. Before Delta Force commandos snatched Nicolás Maduro in January, an account made bets on Polymarket worth $34,000 on whether the Venezuelan leader would be ousted. It pocketed $400,000. The pattern repeated this month, when someone made $553,000 on bets about Iran just before its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed by an Israeli airstrike.

These well-timed bets have raised questions about insider trading. It is possible that these users got incredibly lucky. But many suspect that officials cashed in on their knowledge of top-secret war plans. The fact that Polymarket accepts only crypto, which offers a layer of anonymity, would seem to make it particularly appealing for this purpose. Democratic congressman Ritchie Torres has called these markets a “cesspool of corruption”.

Coplan has shrugged off the criticism. “The richer we get, the more haters we get,” he said earlier this month. This attitude has characterised the tousled-haired Coplan’s rise to the top.

The New Yorker is the child of two South African academics, who separated when he was young. His father, whom Coplan has described as a “mad scientist”, studied psychological disorders. His mother taught at New York University’s (NYU) film department. Coplan was a precociously bright student yet struggled in the classroom. Although he aced his secondary school exams, at one point he was placed in a class for pupils with special needs.

As a teenager he fizzed with business ideas and closely followed the trajectories of tech billionaires. Aged 14, while at Beacon School, one of the city’s most selective public schools, he wanted to set up an electronic trading platform and emailed the New York office of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, asking if they would meet him to discuss the legal process. He didn’t receive a reply. At 16 he landed his first job by turning up unannounced at the offices of a tech startup, after they did not respond to several requests for an internship.

Afterwards Coplan went to NYU to study computer science but dropped out after his first semester. There followed several ventures in crypto, something he had already been dabbling in. In 2014 he bought $150 worth of Ether, a cryptocurrency, which would be worth roughly $1m today. But he soon became fed up with the grifting rife in the sector.

He founded Polymarket in 2020 during the pandemic. Prediction markets were not a new idea. Before the second world war, informal betting was a key source of election forecasting – and had usually got the results right. Although the practice faded, it continued to be studied by economists. Trapped in his Lower East Side apartment during the pandemic, Coplan converted his bathroom into a workspace, determined to create his own platform.

“New York City was shut down,” he told CBS. “And it’s like, ‘When is this gonna end? When’s the vaccine gonna be ready? When is shelter in place gonna be over?’ And prediction markets can take all these disparate opinions that people are pontificating about or that they have really good reason to believe, and distil it down into one probability.”

Coplan energetically promoted the site, forwarding his social media posts to investors, asking them to hit “like”. It didn’t take off immediately, attracting only a small number of bets. There was also a snag: Coplan didn’t have regulatory approval. In January 2021 he was fined $1.4m and forced to block US users – although Americans with a VPN and a crypto wallet could still theoretically access the site in a few clicks.

Then came 2024. Polymarket got two things right that year. First, it successfully predicted that Joe Biden would drop out of the US presidential race. Second, it correctly guessed that Donald Trump would win the election despite traditional pollsters giving Kamala Harris a small lead. It seemed the era of prediction markets had arrived.

Another roadblock followed: the Department of Justice alleged that Coplan was still knowingly allowing US users to bet on Polymarket, prompting the raid on his home. But the Trump administration, which has enthusiastically embraced crypto, proved more amenable. In July, the investigation was dropped and the next month Donald Trump Jr joined Polymarket’s advisory board. In September, it finally got regulatory approval to operate in the US.

Coplan’s big bet – moving first and waiting for regulators to catch up – had paid off. “You need to think big, but you also need to be able to deal with the setbacks, and he has had a lot of setbacks,” says Koleman Strumpf, an economics professor at Wake Forest University. Coplan has overcome these partly through luck, but also by building relationships. Strumpf added: “He doesn’t have a lot of downtime, but you still see him chatting with traders on Twitter. He’s really into what he does, and he likes talking to people about this… He knows how to talk to regular people and the 1%, and both are pretty important skills”.

Coplan believes prediction markets are “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of a super crystal ball”. The thinking goes that they tend to be accurate because there is money involved, aggregating the information of people who have a financial incentive to tell the truth. This means all other considerations are cast aside.

But the prevalence of war betting has drawn a backlash, and there is talk on Capitol Hill of greater regulation. Allegations of insider trading on Venezuela and Iran raise a national security dilemma. Could adversaries of the US glean some forewarning of American military action by monitoring sharp spikes in the prediction markets?

Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy at Better Markets, thinks so. He also argues that the platforms could undermine democracy, raising a scenario where someone places a large bet on a candidate in order to bolster perceptions of their popularity. This could allow the candidate to point to their odds on Polymarket “and say, ‘Hey, look I’m the frontrunner’,” said Schiffrin. “It seems like it’s inviting the manipulation of our elections.”

Shayne Coplan

Born New York City

Work Entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Polymarket

Family His mother and father are college professors

Illustration by Andy Bunday