A cryptocurrency gambling site run by a baby-faced boss has been hailed as “more accurate than polls” for predicting Donald Trump’s election win.
Forecasting whiz Shane Coplan and his start-up Polymarket proved more accurate than pollsters as traders bet on an easy Trump victory.
Many experts claimed that the battle between the 78-year-old convicted felon and Joe Biden’s 60-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris would be neck-and-neck.
But Polymarket signaled for weeks that Trump would win, and the previously unremarkable site turned out to be right — despite raised eyebrows from many experts.
Coplan said in a post on X after the results were announced: “Make no mistake, Polymarket single-handedly called the election. The global truth machine is here, powered by the people.’
Forecasting whiz Shane Coplan (pictured) and his start-up Polymarket proved more accurate than pollsters as traders bet on an easy Donald Trump victory
The site has humble beginnings, with Coplan sharing a photo four years ago of his “office,” which was actually in his bathroom, with his laptop on a laundry basket.
The cryptocurrency gambling site, run by a baby-faced boss, was hailed as ‘more accurate than polls’ for predicting Donald Trump’s election win
Polymarket’s 26-year-old founder Coplan has stayed out of the spotlight until now.
But after his site – which invited users to bet money on a certain outcome – managed to predict the outcome of the November 5 US election, he was praised by 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 a consultant.
But some critics cast doubt on Polymarket’s reliability and how representative it is of the American public.
Coplan grew up in New York City, raised by his mother on the Upper West Side and attended public school in Hell’s Kitchen.
He learned to code at a young age and dropped out to pursue his interests in crypto and prediction markets with a degree in computer science from New York University.
A partner at Dragonfly – one of the investors – said Coplan wants to talk about his work “forever” and “this is his life.”
The startup has raised $70 million to date, including $45 million in May, from top investors.
Several bold predictions have been made, from Joe Biden’s resignation to the suggestion that Trump would choose JD Vance as his running mate.
Instead of a central oddsmaker, Polymarket works by determining the probability of users purchasing ‘shares’ in an outcome.
Theoretically, prediction markets are more accurate because the financial incentive makes people more likely to be truthful.
Many pollsters saw the race as a statistical dead end, with Kalshi, Polymarket and other betting platforms giving the Republican a lead of about 65-35.
AP listed the presidential results as Trump 50.4 percent and Harris 48 percent.
Trump will become the oldest president ever inaugurated, beating President Biden’s record by five months.
A screenshot of the Polymarket odds predicting Trump’s victory
The Polymarket election market on October 28
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The site has humble beginnings, with Coplan sharing a photo four years ago of his “office,” which was actually in his bathroom, with his laptop on a laundry basket in front of a damaged door.
He captioned it: “2020, no money, solo founder, HQ in my makeshift bathroom office. I didn’t know Polymarket would change the world.”
The young entrepreneur has kept his personal political leanings hidden, but recently had breakfast with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
He even shared a tweet showing Polymarket images shown 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 the betting markets. More accurate than polls because there is real money at stake.”
And Coplan later posted: “Polymarket helped people go to bed early on election night, including Elon Musk” and “Elon never gets old as a Polymarket fan.”
When his site made headlines, he posted a message clarifying that his company is “strictly nonpartisan.”
“We’re just market nerds who think prediction markets provide the public with a much-needed alternative data source.
‘Polymarkt is not about politics.’
During his first TV interview on CNBC, the curly-haired founder said he feels a “sense of victory.”
He said: ‘I understand it’s a new concept and people were sceptical, but hopefully people will turn around 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 strong supporter of Trump and has praised the online predication markets
“What is undeniable is that Polymarket was the first destination to make it clear that Trump won. It was a good two or three hours ahead of the media.
“We were in the office looking at the opportunities and it seemed like a done deal.”
Smiling, he continued, “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 and very nerdy teenager.”
Coplan called the experience of hearing people celebrate while looking at his site “humbling.”
Kalshi, Polymarket and other betting platforms have quickly emerged as a way to legally put money into elections and gauge who is ahead, after successive cycles in which pollsters’ predictions crashed and burned.
How it works is that bettors place ‘trades’ on a candidate and receive a payout if they back the correct outcome. More and bigger bets on a frontrunner increase that candidate’s chances, while at the same time lowering the gamblers’ returns.
Together, these platforms ended Tuesday night with a purse of about $450 million. On his own, Kalshi took in $1 billion in bets on the 2024 race, Mansour says.
Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi, said the results confirmed his fledgling industry, which weeks earlier predicted a defeat for Harris — and also rightly called the race for Trump before the major news networks early Wednesday morning.
‘The markets were right. The markets performed better,” Mansour told DailyMail.com. “The markets are going to be the thing people are looking at in the next cycle. They’re not going back.’
Donald Trump with wife Melania and son Barron on election night. The prediction markets looked at Trump’s lead among voters ahead of the polls
The markets are “not a crystal ball,” Mansour said, but are better than pollsters at marshalling the wisdom of the crowd.
It quickly became clear that the gambling markets were focused on the money.
Opinion polls, which ask voters about how they plan to vote and then process that data, had suggested a tight race, including in the seven swing states that decided the election.
But they underestimated Trump’s support nationally, and by as much as four percentage points in battleground states like North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, as of Friday’s count.
In a particularly egregious example, Ann Selzer’s poll on election night in Iowa, which gave Harris an unlikely lead in a reliably red state, was off by as much as 17 points.
Kalshi and other markets had given Trump a clear lead since early October. The forecast was tightened in early November, but Harris was usually at least 10 points behind her rival.
Direct betting on elections is restricted in the US.
But platforms like Kalshi, PredictIt and Polymarket are not strictly speaking gambling sites; they circumvent the restrictions by serving as a platform for trading 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 prohibits US users from participating, but savvy gamblers can sometimes get around that 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 expires, which was early Wednesday in the Electoral College for Trump.
The payout was estimated at $287 million on Tuesday evening.
The Polymarket gambler set for the biggest racing payout in 2024 is a Paris-based investor known as the “Polymarket whale,” who has made $40 million worth of Trump-related bets on the site . According to his accounts on the site, he will walk away with $80 million.