Polymarket founder becomes youngest self-made billionaire after deal with NYSE owner

A couple of years after dropping out of New York University with dreams of making it big in crypto, Mr 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.

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Some time after dropping out of New York University, Mr Shayne Coplan, 27, began building Polymarket from his bathroom, and launched the platform in June 2020. Prediction markets like Polymarket allow users to bet on the outcomes of various events, such as elections or whether the US Federal Reserve will cut interest rates.

(PHOTO: BLOOMBERG)

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 white papers,” he recalled thinking in a later post on X. Then Covid-19 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 was not a smooth road. The firm’s move-fast, ask-permission-later approach repeatedly ran afoul of regulators, who forced it to ban US-based users for years because it was not a registered exchange.