27-year-old Shane Koplan, the founder of the crypto betting platform Polymarket, has become the youngest self-made billionaire, Bloomberg reports.
This happened after the operator of the New York Stock Exchange (Intercontinental Exchange, ICE) announced an investment of up to $2 billion in the company. The deal valued Polymarket at $9 billion.
Koplan founded Polymarket in 2020. Before that, he dropped out of school in New York, lived in debt, and started developing the platform from his own bathroom.
The project has repeatedly caught the attention of regulators: in 2022, the company paid a fine of $1.4 million, and after the presidential elections in 2024, the FBI raided Koplan's apartment. However, by the summer of 2025, the investigation was closed, and Polymarket acquired the licensed exchange QCEX, allowing it to enter the U.S. market legally.
Before the deal with ICE, the platform managed to attract at least $255 million in investments. Among its investors are Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Vitalik Buterin, and the 1789 Capital fund, whose partner is Donald Trump Jr.
Koplan did not comment on the Bloomberg article and the assessment of his wealth, but in a recent post on X, he hinted at the upcoming launch of the POLY token.
Polymarket operates on the Polygon blockchain network, where users of the platform place bets on the outcomes of events by purchasing "yes" or "no" tokens. The market price of the token reflects the collective assessment of probability: for example, $0.20 indicates a 20 percent chance of the event occurring. Winning tokens yield $1 for each, while losing ones become worthless. They can be traded within Polymarket like on an exchange.
Polymarket surged in popularity during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, when the trading volume in predicting the election outcomes exceeded $3 billion.
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