4 hours ago
421
Shayne Coplan is 27 years old, and he has just become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. His road here was not clean or comfortable. He grew up on the Upper West Side of New York City, went to public schools in Hell’s Kitchen, and enrolled in computer science at New York University.
But he dropped out before finishing. By 2019, he was living in a small Lower East Side apartment, so broke that he made a list of his belongings to see what he could sell to cover rent. According to Shayne, that is where the story of Polymarket began.
By then, crypto was full of scams and shady schemes. Shayne was fed up. He turned to the writings of economist Robin Hanson, who had been pushing the idea of prediction markets as a better way to see what people actually thought would happen in the future.
Shayne later wrote on X that the idea was “too good of an idea to just exist in whitepapers.” Then the pandemic arrived, and people were stuck at home. He believed they would want something new to bet on besides sports or stocks. So, from his bathroom, he started coding Polymarket. The platform went live in June 2020.
Polymarket battles the government
The product was fast and raw. Regulators didn’t like it. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) ruled that Polymarket was operating illegally, and U.S. users were blocked. Still, the platform kept growing.
People wanted to bet on elections, interest rate cuts, or who would be Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, users put down more than $3 billion. A week later, FBI agents raided Shayne’s apartment, seizing his devices. The company called the move “obvious political retribution.”
This was not the first time Shayne and his company had to deal with the CFTC. In 2022, Polymarket agreed to pay $1.4 million to settle allegations of illegal trading. The company did not admit wrongdoing but kept U.S. users blocked.
By July 2025, the Justice Department and the CFTC had both dropped their cases. That same month, Polymarket announced it had acquired QCEX, a licensed exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million. With that deal, Polymarket could finally bring back legal U.S. operations.
Investors bet on Shayne
The money around Shayne kept rising. Before this year, Polymarket raised $255 million. Backers included Peter Thiel, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, and Blockchain Capital. In 2024, 1789 Capital also invested. That deal came with Donald Trump Jr. joining the company as an adviser in August, while also advising rival Kalshi.
The biggest news dropped when Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, announced it would put up to $2 billion into Polymarket at an $8 billion valuation.
ICE’s CEO Jeffrey Sprecher is married to Kelly Loeffler, who now leads the Small Business Administration under President Donald Trump. That connection makes Polymarket’s ties to Washington even deeper.
Shayne’s competitors are growing too. Kalshi, through a partnership with Robinhood, began offering prediction contracts. Robinhood reported over 2 billion trades in the third quarter.
That growth put pressure on gambling giants. On the day ICE’s deal with Polymarket was revealed, shares of Caesars Entertainment and DraftKings both fell more than 5%.
Now, Shayne’s company is the largest prediction market in the world, handling over $3.2 billion in bets on the 2024 election alone and getting heavy media coverage.
From buying cheap Ethereum in 2014, to building Polymarket from his bathroom in 2020, to fighting raids and penalties, Shayne has made it into a position no one else his age has ever reached. He is the youngest billionaire on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and for him, the bets keep going.
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.
English (US)