A cryptocurrency betting site run by a baby-faced boss was hailed as “more accurate than polls” in predicting Donald Trump’s election victory.
Prediction wunderkind Shane Coplan and his new company Polymarket turned out to be more accurate than pollsters, as traders bet on an easy Trump victory.
Many experts said the battle between the 78-year-old convicted felon and Joe Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, 60, would be very close.
But Polymarket signaled for weeks that Trump would win, and the previously low-profile site turned out to be right, despite surprising many experts.
Coplan said in a post on X after the results were announced: “Make no mistake, Polymarket called the election on its own before anything else.” The global truth machine is here, powered by the people.”
Predictions wunderkind Shane Coplan (pictured) and his new company Polymarket turned out to be more accurate than pollsters as traders bet on an easy victory for Donald Trump.
The site has humble beginnings: Coplan shared a photo of his ‘office’ four years ago that was actually in his bathroom, with his laptop propped up in a washing basket.
The cryptocurrency betting site run by a baby-faced boss was hailed as “more accurate than polls” in predicting Donald Trump’s election victory.
Coplan, the 26-year-old founder of Polymarket, has, until now, stayed out of the spotlight.
But after his site, which invited users to bet money on a certain outcome, managed to foreshadow the results of the US election on November 5, it has drawn praise from Elon Musk and US statistician Nate Silver.
Silver, one of many experts who predicted the election would be extremely close, was so impressed that he joined the company as an advisor.
But some critics question Polymarket’s reliability and its representativeness of the American public.
Coplan grew up in New York City, was raised on the Upper West Side by his mother, and attended public school in Hell’s Kitchen.
He learned to code at a young age and abandoned his computer science studies at New York University to pursue his interests in cryptography and prediction markets.
A Dragonfly partner, one of the investors, said Coplan wants to talk about his work “forever” and “this is his life.”
The startup has earned $70 million so far, including $45 million in May, from high-profile investors.
He has made several bold predictions, from Joe Biden’s resignation to the suggestion that Trump would choose JD Vance as his running mate.
Instead of a central bookmaker, Polymarket works by determining the probability of users buying “shares” in an outcome.
In theory, prediction markets are more accurate because the financial incentive makes people more likely to tell the truth.
Many pollsters viewed the race as a statistical failure, while Kalshi, Polymarket and other betting platforms gave the Republican a roughly 65-35 lead.
The AP called the presidential results Trump at 50.4 percent and Harris at 48 percent.
Trump will become the oldest president ever inaugurated, surpassing President Biden’s record by five months.
A screenshot of Polymarket odds predicting Trump’s victory
The Polymarket electoral market seen on October 28
The site has humble beginnings, with Coplan sharing a photo of his ‘office’ four years ago that was actually in his bathroom, with his laptop propped up in a washing basket in front of a damaged door.
He captioned it: ‘2020, running out of money, solo founder, headquartered in my makeshift bathroom office. I didn’t know Polymarket was going to change the world.’
The young businessman has kept his personal political leanings a secret, but he recently went to have breakfast with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
He even shared a tweet showing images of Polymarket displayed at RNC headquarters in July.
X CEO Elon Musk shared an image of the odds showing Trump’s lead with the caption: “Trump now leads Kamala by 3 percent in betting markets.” More accurate than surveys, since real money is at stake.’
And Coplan later posted: “Polymarket helped people go to bed early on election night, including Elon Musk” and “Elon, as a Polymarket fan, never gets old.”
When his site started making headlines, he posted to clarify that his company is “strictly non-partisan.”
‘We’re just market nerds who think prediction markets provide the public with a much-needed alternative data source.
“The polymer market is not about politics.”
In his first television interview on CNBC, the curly-haired founder said he feels a “sense of victory.”
He said: ‘I understand it’s a novel concept and people were sceptical, but I hope people realize it and embrace market-based information more.
A devastated Kamala Harris told her dozens of tearful fans to keep fighting as she conceded.
Elon Musk is a big Trump supporter and praised online preaching markets
‘What is undeniable is that Polymarket was the first destination to broadcast that Trump won. They were a good two or three hours ahead of the media.
“We were in the office, looking at the odds, and it looked like it was a done deal.”
He went on to say while smiling, “I apologize to the pollsters, I hope we haven’t put any of them out of business.”
When his young age was pointed out, he joked, “I feel old,” adding, “I was just a very curious, very nerdy teenager.”
Coplan called the experience of hearing that people were celebrating while looking at his site “humbling.”
Kalshi, Polymarket and other betting platforms quickly emerged as a way to legally invest money in elections and gauge who is ahead, after successive cycles in which pollsters’ forecasts crashed and burned.
The way it works is that bettors make ‘trades’ with a candidate and get paid if they back the correct outcome. More and more bets on a favorite increase that candidate’s odds, while at the same time reducing bettors’ returns.
Together, those platforms ended up with a purse of about $450 million as of Tuesday evening. Kalshi alone received $1 billion in total betting volume on the 2024 race, Mansour says.
Tarek Mansour, chief executive of Kalshi, said the results validated his fledgling industry, which predicted a Harris loss weeks earlier, and also correctly called the race for Trump on major news networks Wednesday morning.
‘The markets were right. The markets outperformed,’ Mansour told DailyMail.com. ‘Markets will be what people look at in the next cycle. They’re not coming back.’
Donald Trump with his wife Melania and son Barron on election night. Prediction markets noted Trump’s lead among voters before the polls
Markets are “not a crystal ball,” Mansour said, but they are better than pollsters at gathering the wisdom of the crowd.
It quickly became clear that the betting markets were betting on the money.
The polls, which involve polling voters on how they plan to vote and then processing that data, had suggested a close race, even in the seven swing states that decided the race.
But they underestimated Trump’s support nationwide, and by as much as four percentage points in battlegrounds like North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, according to Friday’s count.
In a particularly egregious example, Ann Selzer’s poll on the eve of the Iowa election, which gave Harris an unlikely lead in a reliably Republican state, was off by a whopping 17 points.
Kalshi and other markets had given Trump a discernible lead since early October. The prediction became stricter in early November, but most of the time Harris trailed her rival by at least 10 points.
Direct betting on elections is restricted in the United States.
But platforms like Kalshi, PredictIt and Polymarket aren’t strictly betting sites: They avoid restrictions by serving as places to trade contracts on future outcomes.
Kalshi became the first legal prediction market in the US thanks to a federal appeals court ruling last month.
Polymarket says it restricts US-based users from participating, but savvy punters sometimes get around this by using a tool known as a VPN, which can hide their location.
The site, which counts Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund as an investor, allows bettors to continue placing bets until the bet is closed, which occurred when the electoral college was in Trump’s favor early Wednesday.
The payout was estimated at $287 million late Tuesday.
The Polymarket bettor who will get the biggest payout of the 2024 race is a Paris-based investor known as the ‘Polymarket whale’ who placed $40 million worth of Trump-related bets on the site. He will take 80 million dollars, according to his accounts on the site.