A $2 billion investment from NYSE parent ICE vaults Polymarket’s 27 year-old founder Shayne Coplan into the three-comma club and intensifies its rivalry with prediction market competitor Kalshi.
At 27, Shayne Coplan has become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. His estimated 11% stake in Polymarket, the blockchain-based prediction platform he founded in 2020, is now worth at least $1 billion. New York Stock Exchange parent company, Intercontinental Exchange, announced it poured $2 billion into the firm at a $9 billion valuation—in exchange for a 20% stake, according to PitchBook.
The deal caps a meteoric ascent for Polymarket, which was valued at just $1.2 billion earlier this year and has quietly become crypto’s fastest-growing startup. “This is the fastest and largest valuation growth that we’ve seen in crypto,” says Rob Hadick, general partner at venture capital firm Dragonfly, which has invested in Polymarket.
Coplan also revealed two previously undisclosed funding rounds totaling $205 million that drew a billionaire-studded roster of backers: in addition to early investors Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia (net worth: $7.6 billion) and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, the new rounds brought on Figma cofounder Dylan Field ($3.7 billion), Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus ($1.5 billion), Uber’s Travis Kalanick ($3.6 billion) and hedge fund veteran Glenn Dubin ($2.9 billion), as well as Peter Thiel’s ($26.5 billion) Founders Fund and Coinbase, cofounded and run by CEO Brian Armstrong ($16.2 billion). Even Philadelphia Eagles star running back Saquon Barkley became an angel investor in Polymarket last year.
Alongside its investment, ICE will become the “global distributor of Polymarket’s event-driven data” and has agreed “to partner on future tokenization initiatives,” helping bring prediction markets and crypto into the financial mainstream, according to a Tuesday press release. Polymarket and ICE declined to provide additional details but said they will be shared during ICE’s Q3 earnings call on October 30.
“Many hedge funds already use Polymarket odds as inputs into their models—now those odds will flow through institutional rails and gather even more liquidity and pricing signals,” says Dragonfly’s managing partner Haseeb Qureshi. “That’s good for investors, and ultimately, for the information that we as citizens receive to understand the state of the world.”
Coplan launched Polymarket out of his New York City apartment in March 2020, at the height of the pandemic. A lifelong tinkerer who began experimenting with crypto at 14, he drew inspiration from early Ethereum-based prediction markets Augur and Gnosis, both of which never gained much traction. Qureshi, who was also an early backer of Augur, credits Polymarket with turning prediction markets from a niche experiment into a mainstream cultural phenomenon. “A big part of the reason why Polymarket has been successful where others have not is that they managed to [embrace] this behavior change and helped build the movement,” he says.
Coplan previously told Forbes that he founded Polymarket to be a “trusted information source,” particularly to solve the “rampant misinformation” around the pandemic. His first markets centered on Covid-related questions: when the city would reopen or whether a vaccine would be ready by a certain date. “We see CNN as the real incumbent to dethrone,” he added.
But Polymarket’s ascent over the last five years hasn’t come without turbulence. In January 2022, the company paid a $1.4 million fine to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for offering unregistered markets and was ordered to block U.S. users. Yet activity on Polymarket only accelerated, culminating in $3.6 billion of trading volume during the U.S. presidential election last year. A week after the election, the FBI raided Coplan’s apartment and seized his devices as part of an investigation into potential violations of the CFTC agreement.
In July 2025, the CFTC and the Department of Justice dropped their investigations, and a week later Polymarket announced its $112 million acquisition of QCX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange, paving the way for a compliant domestic launch. In September, the CFTC greenlit the launch, just days after Donald Trump Jr. invested in and joined Polymarket’s advisory board through 1789 Capital, the venture firm where he is a partner. (Trump Jr. has also served as a strategic advisor to Polymarket’s main rival Kalshi since January.)
As regulation under the current administration has loosened in favor of prediction markets and crypto, Polymarket and Kalshi have been seizing the moment and deepening their ties to Washington. In addition to Trump Jr., ICE CEO Jeffrey Sprecher (net worth: $1.2 billion) and his wife Kelly Loeffler, a former ICE executive and head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, are also prominent Trump allies.
Alongside Polymarket, Kalshi had also been seeking a funding round and announced Friday it raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation led by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Coinbase, comedian Kevin Hart and basketball player Kevin Durant, among others.
Though not blockchain-native like Polymarket, Kalshi has been making its own push into digital assets, recently hiring 23-year-old influencer John Wang as head of crypto. Kalshi pulled ahead in trading volume reaching $956 million last week versus Polymarket’s $465 million, according to Dune Analytics—driven largely by its sports markets, though Polymarket continues to dominate the politics category. However, it remains unclear how much of that activity translates into actual income for these platforms as Polymarket doesn’t charge fees on trades and both depend on market makers like Susquehanna International Group, which services Kalshi, to keep their markets liquid.
That dynamic could soon shift. Following the announcement on ICE’s investment, Coplan teased the potential launch of a Polymarket token in a post on X listing the largest cryptocurrencies alongside “$POLY 🤔.” Rumors of the token launch have circulated for months and could help Polymarket improve liquidity on the platform by giving traders and market makers new incentives to participate.
Reflecting on the company’s triumph after years of turmoil, Coplan signed off in an X post Tuesday: “The best is yet to come… Que Sera Sera.” Whatever will be, will be.
Update: The article was updated to include Kalshi’s new funding round.
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