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 almost 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 that it lets a kid in their bedroom — or their bathroom, office or whatever — 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 building something innovative in traditional fintech is insurmountable for anyone trying to create something new who is young and doesn’t have a lot of capital and doesn’t have a lot of time,” he said.
Launched in 2020, Polymarket lets users trade the probabilities of real-world outcomes — from elections to Fed decisions to celebrity gossip. The platform does not operate based on 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 sample of people… but they consistently lean one way or the other. It’s just noise.”
He believes that the markets provide something more honest: a price backed by conviction and risk.
“We have this cycle where when there’s a big election, everyone flocks to Polymarket, everyone checks it. Then everyone comes up and makes a conspiracy theory about why it’s not accurate,” he said. “If Cuomo trades for five cents to gain $1… if it’s actually worth 40 or 50 cents and it trades for five, you should buy it. You should put your money where your mouth is.”
Every trade on Polymarket is peer-to-peer and prices reflect collective beliefs. “It’s not a function of how much money has been put on each candidate,” Coplan explained. “At any given time there are yes shares… and if you look at the order book, there are bids and bids.
Whatever the midpoint is, that’s the probability. That’s what the present value is to win $1 if that’s right.”
Beyond politics, Coplan sees a broader potential: prediction markets as tools for decision-making, even in public policy.
“You can say, what’s the probability that Cuomo wins if Sliwa doesn’t drop out, and what’s the probability that he wins if he drops out?” he said. “From the markets, if you structure it right, you can help 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 bet or trade the outcome of a game… there is a monopoly on pricing. You are trading against the house every time,” he said. “They can set the prices they want. If you make money, they can ban you. They can profile you and give you worse prices or put a cap on you.”
“This is America. You see something that is inefficient and that is manipulated with the consumer – when it’s a financial market, but it’s positioned as an entertainment product that’s designed for you to lose – you can’t go and complain when there are alternatives in the financial markets.”
Coplan envisions Polymarket eventually playing a role in sectors such as insurance, where consumers often face bundled services and high premiums.
“A lot of the time if you’re offloading or trying to hedge against some kind of exotic risk, you’re dealing with a company that has a sales team, a risk department… you usually end up paying really bad prices,” he said. “What’s great about Polymarket is that you could see people creating a Polymarket for the same type of risk…people who are in the business of pricing risks can provide liquidity. People who are 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 experimenting with these AI agents that can gauge sentiment, monitor news and basically form their own opinion… when they see mispricing, they can try to correct the market,” he said. “Even if there’s very little liquidity or a small liquidity boost, you’re going to have those agents gone, and people are going to compete to build the most accurate agents.”
Coplan said the long tail of niche markets — all 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 probability of something – could be extended to a much larger range of possibilities.”
As Polymarket prepares to scale its US presence and onboard new users through a beta exchange, Coplan remains focused on staying ahead of legacy institutions – and building a platform that lives up to blockchain’s original promise.
“We’re just trying to build the best product,” he said. “Something people love to use, where your opinion actually matters.”
