Miami Beach — When Shayne Coplan launched Polymarket, he didn’t have a team or major funding. What he had was a blockchain, a strong conviction and a laptop.
“I’m a solo founder. I literally started with next to no money,” Coplan said during a conversation at Cantor Fitzgerald’s crypto, AI and blockchain conference in Miami Beach on Wednesday. “The cool thing about blockchains is it lets some kid in his bedroom — or their bathroom, office, or whatever it is — go and innovate and experiment with financial applications.”
He credited the open nature of blockchain for allowing him to create a functioning global market without traditional institutional backing. “The barrier to entry to go build something innovative in traditional fintech is prohibitive for any person who’s trying to create something new, who’s young and doesn’t have a lot of capital and doesn’t have a lot of time,” he said.
Polymarket, launched in 2020, lets users trade on the likelihood of real-world outcomes — from elections to Fed decisions to celebrity gossip. The platform doesn’t work off polling data or expert predictions. Instead, it lets the market determine the odds.
“When people are tracking an election, or an election that has implications for their livelihood, they want to know who’s going to win,” Coplan said. “Polls are okay, here’s a random assortment of people… but they consistently lean one way or the other. It’s just noise.”
He believes markets provide something more honest: a price backed by conviction and risk.
“We have this cycle where whenever there’s a big election, everyone flocks to Polymarket, everyone’s checking it. Then everyone comes up and concocts a conspiracy theory about why it’s not accurate,” he said. “If Cuomo is trading at five cents to win $1… if it’s actually worth 40 or 50 cents and it’s trading at five, you should buy it. You should put your money where your mouth is.”
Each trade on Polymarket is peer-to-peer, and the prices reflect collective belief. “It’s not a function of how much money has been put on each candidate,” Coplan explained. “At any given moment, there are yes shares… and if you look at the order book, there’s bids and asks.
Whatever the midpoint is, that’s the likelihood. That’s what the present value is to win $1 if it’s right.”
Beyond politics, Coplan sees broader potential: prediction markets as tools for decision-making, even in public policy.
“You can say, what is the likelihood of Cuomo winning if Sliwa doesn’t drop out, and what is the likelihood of him winning if he does drop out?” he said. “From the markets, if you structure it right, you can aid decision-making in society on an unprecedented scale.”
Coplan also believes Polymarket can compete with legacy betting platforms by offering something traditional sportsbooks can’t: fairness.
“If you’re betting or trading the outcome of a game… there’s a monopoly on pricing. You trade against the house every time,” he said. “They can set whatever prices they want. If you make any money, they can ban you. They can profile you and give you worse prices or cap you.”
“This is America. You see something that inefficient and that rigged against the consumer — when it is a financial market, but it’s positioned as an entertainment product designed for you to lose — you can’t go and complain when financial market alternatives come along.”
Coplan envisions Polymarket eventually playing a role in sectors like insurance, where consumers often face bundled services and high premiums.
“A lot of the time, if you’re laying off or trying to hedge against some sort of exotic risk, you’re interfacing with a company that has a sales team, a risk department… you usually end up paying really bad prices,” he said. “What’s awesome about Polymarket is you could see people creating a Polymarket for the same type of risk… people in the business of pricing risk can provide liquidity. People good at sales can go and enable them to hedge those risks.”
He also touched on the role AI agents may soon play in trading markets. “You see a lot of people experiment with these AI agents that can gauge sentiment, monitor the news, and basically form their own opinion… when they see a mispricing, they can try to correct the market,” he said. “Even if there’s very little liquidity, or a small liquidity subsidy, you’ll have these agents go, and people will compete to build the most accurate agents.”
Coplan said the long tail of niche markets — anything related to uncertainty — is where much of Polymarket’s potential lies. “Will it drive a lot of volume? No. But will it unlock a new format of information? Yes,” he said. “Polymarket odds — the percentage likelihood of something — could be extended to a much larger swath of opportunities.”
As Polymarket prepares to scale its U.S. presence and onboard new users through a beta exchange, Coplan remains focused on staying ahead of legacy institutions — and building a platform that delivers on blockchain’s original promise.
“We just try to build the best product,” he said. “Something people love to use, where your opinion actually matters.”
