The Polymarket website is something of a current events exchange. The platform allows users to place bets on future outcomes, from who will win the presidential election to how the Federal Reserve will change interest rates to whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will turn out in this one year will separate. (As for that last point, “yes” is currently trading at seven cents, which is a seven percent rate – unlikely.) At the beginning of October, Polymarket had Donald Trump and Kamala Harris tied at just under fifty percent each, with the rest at just under each Fifty percent A fraction of a point goes to tiny existing bets on the likes of Joe Biden and “Other Republican Politicians.” As of this week, Trump is at 64 percent. If you bet on Trump now and hold your shares until the election, if Trump wins, you will receive one dollar for every 64 cents invested. Trump’s odds on Polymarket are significantly higher than those in national polls and above those on other, smaller election betting sites such as Kalshi and Predictit, which put Trump at 60 percent and 58 percent, respectively. In total, Polymarket has amassed more than $2 billion in bets on the election, thanks in part to the fact that around June, an account called Fredi9999 began pouring money into the Trump side. In August and September, several other accounts seemingly linked to Fredi9999 joined in, ultimately bringing in more than $43 million in pro-Trump and pro-Republican bets and driving up Trump’s stock price, according to Bloomberg.

The Trump move against Polymarket, in turn, has become a point of discussion in the election itself. Outlets like Bloomberg and the Financial Times have regularly cited Polymarket figures along with survey results in their analyzes of the election process. On October 6, Elon Musk posted on “Not what the hell that means, but it means we’re doing pretty well.” For those whose job it is to study the election, the question is whether the enthusiasm of a relatively small number of crypto-savvy bettors – Polymarket had around 150,000 active accounts as of October – actually in any way pointing to reality, or whether the bets could represent a form of manipulation that hurts the momentum for Trump.

Shayne Coplan, the 26-year-old founder of Polymarket, rarely gives interviews, but he recently spoke to me about the rise in pro-Trump betting. He told me that the activity of whales like Fredi9999 simply proves that the market is working. “There’s nothing stopping people from buying something they think is undervalued, but they’re not doing it right now,” he said of the Harris site, adding, “because nobody has enough conviction that It should be worth it.” Coplan is considered something of a prodigy in the world of blockchain technology. He grew up in New York City as the child of two teachers and became an early adopter of Ethereum as a teenager. He read academic papers Work on market theory and was particularly influenced by Robin Hanson’s 2013 article “Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?”, which argues that a free market is an effective tool for “enabling people to acquire information to move” and “Gather this information into consensus prices that persuade a broader audience” – and therefore that market systems should influence government decision-making and political policy as well as, for example, the valuation of public companies on the stock market. Hanson coined the word “futarchy” for policymaking based on such predictive mechanisms. Polymarket – funded by venture capital from investors such as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum – is Coplan’s attempt to implement Hanson’s ideas, literally creating a marketplace of ideas, or at least an intellectualized version of sports betting. He told me, “What we really want to build is a beacon of truth.”

We spoke via video call from Coplan’s glass-walled office in SoHo, where he leads a team of around thirty employees. He has a boyish mane of dark blonde curls and speaks with the curt impatience of someone who is sure he has already thought through every question. Polymarket selects the markets displayed on its website based on user suggestions, but in keeping with the ethos of decentralization in cryptocurrencies, allows them to operate independently using blockchain technology. Every betting topic is formulated as a question; These include “Next James Bond actor?” (for Henry Cavill with eight percent) and “Macron will step down as French president in 2024?” (only a one percent probability for “yes”). Each question “must have a clear solution criterion,” Coplan said, which is a technical way of saying that there must be a clear way to determine the answer. For the presidential election, Polymarket’s criteria requires the Associated Press, Fox News and NBC to call the race for the same candidate. Once a question is live, bettors in a peer-to-peer market can invest in their chosen answer, meaning each bet requires a different user to represent the opposing side. The percentage, as Coplan put it, “represents the current market price based on all the people who want to trade on either side.”

Polymarket runs on a cryptocurrency called USDC. The currency itself is not speculative like Bitcoin – it is a “stablecoin” pegged to the price of the US dollar – but like other cryptocurrencies, its existence on the blockchain means that transactions carried out in USDC are transparent. Every single bet on Polymarket is recorded and publicly traceable, which is why it was possible to identify Freddi9999’s outsized investments. When a question appears to be resolved, Polymarket employs another market-focused cryptocurrency tool called Uma, which provides a system for suggesting and contesting results. (According to Polymarket, despite Trump’s heated arguments in real life, there were no problems resolving the 2020 election bet.) Finally, blockchain smart contracts — essentially self-executing, irreversible cryptocurrency exchanges — automatically process trades and distribute money to the Winner.

Polymarket’s first slogan was: “Using the power of free markets to demystify the real-world events that matter most to you”; Coplan imagined that his platform would predict when COVID Vaccines would come to market and offer a rational alternative to the chaotic environment of social media. “There’s news and misinformation all day long, and you have to figure out, ‘Does this matter?’ Is this material or is this just nonsense? What you see over and over again is something is going to fall and the market doesn’t move, and the market tells you, ‘Hey, this is meaningless.'” Markets force participants to participate, Coplan’s logic goes; The behavior of the market, in turn, contains more wisdom than, for example, experts expressing their opinions. Still, there are obvious limitations to the predictive power of Polymarket’s self-selecting betting population. For one thing, the platform has been technically illegal to use in the United States since 2022, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission determined that the platform was an unlicensed derivatives market; Polymarket cooperated with the government and settled for a $1.4 million fine and a ban on US users, although many people circumvent the ban by using proxy servers and other tools. (Kalshi and other election betting platforms face similar existential complaints.) The platform also requires users to be reasonably familiar with cryptocurrency wallets, although there are now shortcuts for placing bets through traditional bank accounts. As a result, Polymarket’s user base is focused on specific demographics: non-Americans, men, and extremely online.

So one can imagine that many of the users betting on the election know little about US politics and that their opinions could be shaped by a bias in the crypto world against Trump, who has so far courted the industry more directly than Harris to release its own non-fungible tokens. The pro-Trump whale seemed to fit this mold. As one participant in the election bet told me, “It was hard not to notice who he was; A lot of whales talk to each other and know each other.” Polymarket power users saw the trades and attributed them to the same source; A user named Domer, one of the site’s most hyperactive bettors (he has money on Harris), chatted briefly with Fredi9999 on Discord and, using ChatGPT analysis, hypothesized that the user was likely French. Reuters later reported that the accounts actually belonged to non-Americans.

I asked Coplan whether all of these factors make Polymarket’s election bet less likely. He insisted that at least political knowledge had nothing to do with it. “According to price discovery theory, a lot of unsuspecting people trading would be more predictive and accurate than a single expert,” he said. (In 2020, Polymarket bettors gave Trump a 36 percent chance of winning.) The Polymarket bettor I spoke to had a different opinion. The booming pro-Trump market was driven only half by the wisdom of the crowd, he said, and half by “that giant whale.” Was manipulating Polymarket odds possibly a way to influence the election? Perhaps, as some observers suggested, the whale was trying to create a positive talking point for Trump and his supporters, which might then encourage more voters to join in. “No,” Coplan said when I brought this up. The bet “depends on the outcome of the event – that doesn’t necessarily mean it has any bearing on it.” His emphatic rationalism was somewhat at odds with the fact that Trump’s supporters found it easy enough to manipulate many other political platforms.

And yet, if the market disagreed with a heavy bettor, you would expect it to correct itself. So far that hasn’t happened. Although Fredi9999’s bets have declined or stopped altogether (or shifted to more hidden accounts), Trump’s odds on Polymarket continue to rise. Coplan is unimpressed. “Everyone is making a fuss, but it’s only sixty percent,” he said. “It’s still almost neck and neck.” ♦