Shayne Coplan

Shayne Coplan (born 1998) is an American entrepreneur and technologist best known as the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market. In October 2025, he became the world's youngest self-made billionaire, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with an estimated net worth of $1.0 billion, according to Forbes. He was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan by his mother, and attended public schools in Hell's Kitchen,

Career Coplan's first crypto-based project was TokenUnion, a loyalty program that rewarded users for holding specific tokens. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, he pivoted to focus entirely on prediction markets, In early 2019, he even wrote to Hanson expressing his ambition to "bring prediction markets to life", though Hanson was skeptical after having seen many such attempts fail.

Polymarket gained early traction during the 2020 United States presidential election by correctly signaling the victory of Joe Biden weeks before Election Day. Coplan made light of the incident, quipping "New phone, who dis?" on social media after his phone was confiscated by agents. No charges were filed against him, and in July 2025 the U.S. Department of Justice and CFTC dropped their investigations into Polymarket without any further action. paving the way for Polymarket to resume service to U.S. customers by the end of 2025 after nearly three years of being barred domestically.

Personal life Outside of Polymarket, Coplan has been active in the digital art and crypto collectibles space. Under the pseudonym "ethsquiat", he amassed a large collection of NFT artwork during the crypto art boom of 2020–2021, and he is credited with discovering and mentoring emerging NFT artists such as FEWOCiOUS, who later became one of the industry's top-selling creators.