Traders betting on a victory for Donald Trump in the US election have raked in huge sums on cryptocurrency trading platform Polymarket, including an anonymous financier who made an estimated $85 million.
The cryptocurrency gambling site beat the pollsters and “took the election above all else,” its 26-year-old founder Shayne Coplan said on Nov. 6.
Among those who reaped the biggest rewards from the outcome was the so-called “Trump Whale,” a French national who calls himself Théo.
The financier relied on predictions from niche polls of neighboring countries, including those he commissioned himself, meaning he was essentially betting against the accuracy of U.S. polls.
He was so confident that the Republican would win the race that he reportedly bet $30 million of his own money on it, while Polymarket contradicted traditional polling by swinging heavily in favor of a Trump victory.
The crypto entrepreneur – a New York University dropout – boasted that his app helped Musk and others “go to bed early on election night” because of the “early call”
A screenshot of the Polymarket odds predicting Trump’s victory
The ‘Trump Whale’ was so confident that the Republican would win the race that he reportedly bet $30 million of his own money on it
According to the funder, traditional polls failed to account for the “shy Trump voter effect”: voters who supported the former president but were unwilling to share their opinions publicly or with pollsters.
When he placed his bets, the odds of Trump winning were 40 percent, but his bet was by no means based on gut feelings, he told the Wall Street Journal.
He had his own surveys conducted to measure the so-called ‘neighborhood effect’, where he asked people not who they voted for, but who they thought the neighbors were.
Théo criticized the mainstream media’s polls, saying they underestimated Trump and were skewed in favor of Democrats.
‘This is different in France!! The credibility of the pollsters is more important: they want to get as close as possible to the actual results. The culture is different here,” he told reporters.
He insisted he was in no way trying to rig the election with his huge bet, telling the WSJ: “My intention is just to make money.”
Many election observers kept an eye on Polymarket during the race for the White House, with the odds splashed across X and shared by Elon Musk as evidence of momentum for Trump.
“more accurate than polls, because there is real money at stake,” Musk said on X in October, sharing the latest data from the Coplan app.
The crypto entrepreneur – a New York University dropout – boasted that his app helped Musk and others “go to bed early on election night” because of the “early call.”
“On election night, Polymarket was the first destination to make it clear that Trump had won,” he told CNBC. “It was a good two or three hours ahead of the media.”
“On Polymarket it seemed like a done deal, and if you just watched TV you’d think it was neck-and-neck,” Polymarket CEO Shayne Caplan said of the platform’s early appeal to Trump on the election day.
Despite endorsements from high-profile Trump backers Musk and Peter Thiel, who were among the investors who helped the platform raise $70 million this year, Coplan has insisted that Polymarket is “strictly impartial.”
Writing on X, he said the site is “not about politics. It was never our vision to be a political website, and it still isn’t.”
While Polymarket traders moved in the right direction by betting on Trump’s victory, most favored Harris to win the popular vote – which he would later win.
Betting on Polymarket soared as traders rushed to bet on the US presidential election, with trading volume exceeding $3.6 billion for winner predictions, according to data shared by the platform.
Bookmakers have been betting on the outcome of elections for centuries. Polymarket is different because it functions more like a financial exchange, with traders buying and selling digital contracts with each other.
While betting markets have historically been effective at reflecting election results, they have occasionally been dramatically wrong, including during the 2016 Brexit vote.
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.
Polymarket and other betting platforms have quickly emerged as a way to legally put money into elections and gauge who has the edge, after successive cycles in which pollsters’ predictions crashed and burned.
People place “trades” on a candidate and get a payout if they support the right outcome. More and bigger bets on a frontrunner increase that candidate’s chances, while at the same time lowering people’s returns.
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 U.S.-based users from participating, and that it has a large user base abroad in countries like France. However, many users in the country get around this by using a tool known as a VPN, which can hide their location.
Tarek Mansour, CEO of betting platform 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.