Polymarket’s Shayne Coplan & Axios’ Dan Primack

Shane Copelan is the founder and CEO of Poly Market, a new kind of platform where prediction meets participation. He is turning public opinion into tradable insights, blurring the line between data, markets, and transparency. Copeland stands for the next generation of entrepreneurs, reshaping how information moves and what investors do with it.

Thank you for having me.

That's the story. Yeah. I'd read, you know, when I look back at like old documents or old emails, I was already very passionate about prediction markets, information markets, decision markets, view. I'd read all these academic papers about it. I'd emailed the authors. I'd used the predecessors, the existing products. Whenever I'd use them, I'd be like, "Well, this isn't right, but you know, this is wrong. This is so cool, but I can't even make sense of it because the product obfuscates it, etc." And at the onset of the pandemic, I had dropped out. I was 21. I dropped out when I was 18. I didn't have [__] to show for it. I was running out of money in the Lower East Side. And I was like, man, if we had information markets on when the pandemic, how the pandemic would play out or when the vaccine would be ready or when shelter in place in New York would be over, it would be the perfect use case of these market mechanisms. And I was on X the whole time, Twitter, and it was just this like endless supply of misinformation and pontification and different people claiming different opinions and it was just impossible to distill the signal from the noise. So I was like, "Fuck it. I'm going to go build this. It's difficult. No one's done it. There's risks, but I have a vision for how I can do it better."

So to distill down what a Poly Market is, there's a yes and no share for every question. You ask a question, you have yes shares and no shares. If you're buying a yes share, you're basically being matched with someone buying a no share or someone who has a yes share is selling it. But even that is economically similar. So the way it works is you have these yes shares for these events and you get a dollar per share if you're right. And just like a stock gets traded and the stock goes up if it's performing well based on sentiment, also based on fundamentals. This is an asset that is worth $1 if something specific happens. So the net present value of that asset is equal to the likelihood of it happening unless it's a very far time frame. And then it gets more complicated because the time value of money, but let's just say it's something that's happening in a week. Whatever the market is pricing that asset as is, it's basically saying this is the likelihood of this event occurring because you get a dollar if it occurs. And if it's trading at 20 cents, people think it's going to, it's 20% likely to happen. And you know, the term wisdom of the crowds gets thrown around a lot. But really what it is is it's price formation. It's this idea that you have people saying, "Oh, well, I'll buy at this price, but if it goes too high, I'm not going to buy there." And people will say, "Well, I'll sell at this price." And you know, someone says, "Well, I'll sell it to you even for prediction is basically."

Yeah. I mean, it's price discovery applied to an asset that is mapped to the likelihood of something. So, you know, you look at an order book and where supply meets demand at any given moment, whatever the market price is, that's the percentage likelihood. And, you know, that's kind of complicated. Not everyone can understand it, but when you distill it down to here's the percentage likelihood for this happening and here's how it trends over time, it becomes very digestible and very useful for people. And I think that's why we've seen something that's pretty niche and pretty complicated take off on the scale that it has is because when it's distilled down from a consumer perspective, it's really informative.

We don't make money. Yeah, we lose money. I mean, look, our goal is, you know, when you build something on a blockchain, there were the way that we built it initially, which is still built on a blockchain, there were sort of different norms of how to do it. And, you know, we're entering the US, and I would expect it to be different. And it's not like we don't like money. It's that when you're creating a new market, you want to try to grow the market as big as possible and have as much market share. So from our point of view, the idea that when you look at any Poly Market, you look at the order book, there is a spread. The same way that on Robinhood there's no fees, but there's a spread because there's payment for order flow and that on a sports book, you're not paying a fee, but the price that you're seeing bakes in a spread. So there is a spread on Poly Market. It's just that the spread is being pocketed by people who are providing.

Yeah, I mean eventually we're going to take a cut of trading.

Yeah, the exchange is live. Like the time from us acquiring QCX.

Yeah. A few months ago and it's been all hands on deck to get that operational and get to market. We've been beta testing it. We've had people at the office coming and beta testing it. It's been a lot of fun. There's, you know, just like it's like going back to the basics. You're building a new product. Obviously we've learned a lot from building Poly Market as it is today, international DeFi. And the goal for Poly Market in the US is it's starting mobile first and it's meant to be Poly Market in your pocket as distilled and as distilled down and simple as possible. Excuse me. So yeah, the exchange is live. If you go and look at the filings from the clearing house, you'll see okay, there's volume there.

Well, I think that it says public, so I think that's probably the delta between, you know, the fact that there's like the exchange is operational and there's money flowing through it. No comment on the right position to take on that.

Most definitely. Look, to clear up the air on the token stuff, it's like all options are on the table for Poly Market at any given moment, right? It's been five and a half years.

I think it was just, you know, one of our guys saying that. And like yeah, it's as with a lot of projects, any project that's building on a blockchain, you have to weigh the options. You know, we've grown a lot. If we grow a lot in the US, there's an alternative path of going public and you know, we did.

Yeah. So to take a step back as to like the promise of blockchains and why the idea of building on blockchains is integral to the story of Poly Market. It's when I started Poly Market, I really did not have money. I really was stressed about money and running out of money. And I was very passionate about this idea. I felt like I was the one guy who could blend the product design that was necessary to make something like this more mass market or even somewhat digestible versus like the very technical intricate academic approach to building the product like because the underpinnings of Poly Market are so complicated and they're so deeply rooted in academia and like the rationalist community and the people who do that rarely know how to build mass market products. So, I was a nerd about both and I was like, I think I can figure this out or at least it's worth a shot and the timing is right and you know, I just wouldn't have been able to do that if I had to go and you know, retain lawyers and get all these figure all these things out. It's like...

Yeah. So look, ultimately there would be no prediction markets if I didn't go as you said today, if I wasn't like, hey, I'm going to go experiment with this and build a new user experience and figure it out. So the idea of experimentation is amazing. Allows for innovation. There's myriad benefits to tokenization in particular. Things are naturally 24/7, trading 24/7. There's global liquidity. There's transparency. You see who's trading what. People talk about, oh, asymmetric information. You're able to go and see the provenance of every market and each wallet and what they hold and you're able to go and much more easily defend and sort of identify where there are trades that likely divulge more information than a typical trade to the market. So if like someone makes a new account and they make a trade versus someone who's traded all the time. And what I'm very excited about is the ability to go and turn tokens into Lego blocks basically and go and say, well, I have an outcome for this Poly Market and I can bundle that with an asset and then that can be a structured product or you can go and use the outcome token of a Poly Market as collateral and borrow against it. I think that it's not by chance that you hear so much hullabaloo about like the largest consumer fintechs like Robinhood, Coinbase moving extremely aggressively into tokenization and sort of betting their future on that as well as all this talk about stablecoins. It's, there's a lot of reasons why finance would turn to being built on a blockchain and being global and united as opposed to all these silos where there's these companies that gatekeep everything and it's hard to move money. So there's tons of benefits. I think that ultimately we are a prediction market company. We're Poly Market and at least as it stands right now in the US, you know, it's difficult if not impossible to go and build like a regulated US exchange built on open decentralized architecture. That may change. We're going to be really focused on that.

Yeah. I mean it's like it's funny a lot of people who are, look, like those things get pitched by competitors to journalists. That's what happens.