Billionaire from the Bathroom: The Story of Polymarket's Founder

Against all odds, this is a reblog by Shayne Coplan, the founder of Polymarket, after being invested 2 billion USD by the New York Stock Exchange.

At that time, he had already become the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, and five years ago, he was a dropout, bankrupt, and a young man hiding in the bathroom betting on an uncertain future.

The word "odds" originated from Shakespeare's "Henry IV," where it was used as a betting term for odds.

Perhaps it is a wonderful coincidence. As the largest prediction market in the world, Polymarket is not only a platform that uses odds to predict the future, but its founder Shayne Coplan's success is also a story of Against all odds (overcoming the odds).

Rebellious "bad student", firm "E guard"

Shayne Coplan was born in 1998 in the Upper West Side of New York (a wealthy area, surrounded by Lincoln Center, Central Park, etc.), raised by his mother who taught film at New York University. His mother often let young Shayne appear in her works, which also cultivated his interest in art and music.

In one of her short films, 9-year-old Shayne played the son of a smart single mother, who asked her, "Since you and Dad split up, who have you slept with?" Then he playfully smiled and said, "You did! I know! Who were they? I will find out!"

Shayne Coplan's investment in an artist

Although growing up in a wealthy environment, this did not give him a sense of belonging. Coplan candidly admitted in an interview, "Growing up in New York is different, you know, everything is relative." This made him realize early on his "middle-class" identity and sparked a strong desire to make money. This desire drove him to indulge in various gray areas, such as downloading copyrighted music on BitTorrent, trading fingerboards with YouTubers, and sometimes the trading partners would not fulfill their promises. These early experiences deeply taught him the importance of "trust" in the market.

Although he attended an elite public high school, he was always an out-of-place "bad student" because the classroom could not keep his attention. At 14, he started learning programming on his own; at 15, to download music not available on iTunes, he found cryptocurrency on a forum and quickly became fascinated, and in the same year, he mined Litecoin with his friends.

Shayne Coplan's high school graduation summary: "I want to thank Sparknotes (a website for review), caffeine, and Wikipedia."

In 2014, during Ethereum's first presale, Coplan spent 150 USD to purchase tokens that now are worth over 1 million USD at a cost price of 0.3 USD. At that time, he had just turned 16. After finishing high school, he enrolled in the computer science program at New York University, but after only one semester, he chose to drop out. Unlike well-known internet entrepreneurs, he had not yet decided what he wanted to do, but simply felt that school was not suitable for him, so he left.

Confusion and exploration after dropping out

For the next few years, he lived in isolation, immersed in reading and trying new things, searching for entrepreneurial inspiration.

During the exploration, Coplan quickly became disappointed with the crypto scene at the time, believing many startups lacked innovation and had some disappointing crypto "scams." At that time, ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) surged, projects raised large amounts of funds, but often rug pulled halfway.

In an interview with The New York magazine, he mentioned this experience: "I realized these were not my role models. These guys were frauds, they did things half-heartedly." In 2017, Coplan founded TokenUnion - his first project, aiming to reward long-term holders of cryptocurrencies by issuing interest. He later created union.market, exploring whether trust between employers and employees in the labor market could be enhanced through POS, but both projects eventually failed.

The origin of Polymarket's inspiration

Economist Robin Hanson described a form of market governance called "Futarchy" in his paper "We Vote on Values, But We Bet on Beliefs," whose core idea can be summarized as democratic voting systems expressing people's political will, while betting markets tell how to achieve it; when a betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy will increase expected national welfare, that proposal should become law.

This paper gave Coplan the inspiration to create Polymarket. If everything has a price, should "truth" also be priced?

In early 2019, Coplan wrote to Hanson, sending multiple emails declaring that he wanted to "be the one to bring prediction markets into reality," but Hanson did not respond to him, as there were too many people who had failed before, and he did not believe in this unknown young person.

However, this incident did not discourage Coplan's confidence, "Who would want to work with me? I have nothing." So he launched the website alone, managing social media himself, sending private messages to every investor he knew, asking them to like or bet.

Vitalik's introduction blog on Futarchy

From wild growth to Wall Street

In early 2020, when the pandemic broke out, the whole world was guessing whether the pandemic would be announced, as well as the timing of lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines. Coplan seized the opportunity, hid in the bathroom, and began building a real-time "prediction market" website, where people could buy shares in the outcome they thought most likely. In June, Polymarket was born and accurately predicted Biden's victory in the presidential election that year.

In 2021, Coplan entered a frenzied fundraising period. In an interview, Coplan said the best feedback was someone saying he "over-promoted himself," "I would be very enthusiastic on stage." Krug, the founder of Augur (the earliest established prediction market, which Coplan had criticized for being too complex), initially refused Coplan's repeated investment pitches. Krug said he set a weekly trading volume target of 5 million USD, telling Coplan that if he reached it, he would invest.

In 2022, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) took a tough stance, requiring Polymarket to pay a fine of 1.4 million USD and promised to completely ban American users.

By the end of 2023, Coplan called Krug and said he had done it. OpenAI firing Sam Altman triggered bets on whether he would return on Polymarket, with funds pouring in.

In 2024, due to the presidential election, Polymarket attracted nearly 3 billion USD in bets, and when traditional polls showed the race was still tight, the platform had already declared Trump's victory.

Subsequently, due to the high bets during the election, regulatory attention was drawn, and the FBI raided Shayne Coplan's apartment and confiscated his phone. Later that evening, after regaining freedom, Coplan posted on X, joking in a typical Gen Z tone, "New phone, who's there?"

As of now, Polymarket has caught the attention of Wall Street, and this platform, once considered a prohibited product, has returned to the United States. As of now, according to its platform display, Polymarket's prediction accuracy rate reaches 95.2% within 4 hours, and 91.1% in the past month.

Meme image made by netizens, indicating doctors use Polymarket to determine whether patients have cancer

Whose facts, whose casino?

Polymarket's initial goal was to build a platform for people to predict the future or the outcome of events, thereby ensuring the factual nature of information. However, can it really do that?

Early this July, a bet on Polymarket drew attention, which was whether Zelenskyy would wear a suit before July. During a meeting, Zelenskyy attended wearing a black jacket. The designer of the clothes, Zelenskyy himself, and major media such as BBC and Reuters all agreed that the garment was a suit. However, UMA (UMA is Polymarket's official dispute resolution mechanism. Judgment is made through staking (usually USDC)) ruled that non-suit won.

Similarly, on October 10th, when the Nobel Peace Prize was announced, the victory of Ukrainian opposition leader Maria Corina Machado (María Corina Machado) became an underdog. About 11 hours before the results were announced, her Polymarket odds jumped from 3.7% to 73.5%, with a surge in transaction volume, leading many to believe there was insider trading.

Aside from insider trading and large players manipulating the market, the platform's own political bias causes it to reach controversial decisions on certain topics.

On October 19, 2023, Shayne Coplan shared a post, originally about whether Israel should be responsible for the attack on Palestinian hospitals. The New York Times answered yes, but Polymarket's decision was no. Subsequently, the original poster deleted the post, and there was no related record on Polymarket.

In addition, there are issues such as regulation, English dominance, and encouraging evil (assassination markets may encourage people to commit evil). However, regardless of how people evaluate it, the switch of this experiment has been turned on and cannot be reversed.