How whizzkid Shayne Copland’s startup Polymarket beat the polls to correctly predict Trump’s win

A cryptocurrency betting site run by a baby-faced boss were hailed as being ‘more accurate than polls’ for predicting Donald Trump’s election win.

The prediction prodigy Shane Coplan and his start-up Polymarket turned out to be more accurate than pollsters as traders bet on an easy Trump victory.

Many experts claimed the battle between the 78-year-old convicted felon and Joe Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris, 60, would be neck-and-neck.

But Polymarket signaled for weeks that Trump would win, and the previously low-profile site turned out to be right – despite raising eyebrows of many experts.

Coplan said in a post on X after the results were announced: ‘Make no mistake, Polymarket single-handedly called the election before anything else. The global truth machine is here, powered by the people.’

Polymarket’s 26-year-old founder Coplan has – until now – stayed out of the limelight.

But after his site – which invited users to bet money on a given outcome – managed to foreshadow the results of the November 5 US election, he has been the subject of praise from Elon Musk and American statistician Nate Silver.

Silver – one of many experts to predict the election would be extremely close – was so impressed that he joined the company as an adviser.

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 on the Upper West Side by his mother and attended public school in Hell’s Kitchen.

He learned to code at an early age, and dropped out of a computer science degree at New York University to pursue his interests in crypto and prediction markets.

A partner at Dragonfly – one of the investors – said Coplan wants to talk about his work ‘forever’ and ‘this is his life’.

The start-up has made $70 million so far, including $45 million in May, from high-profile investors.

It has made several bold predictions, from Joe Biden stepping down to suggesting Trump would pick JD Vance as his running mate.

Instead of a central oddsmaker, Polymarket works by determining the probability by users buying ‘shares’ in an outcome.

Theoretically, prediction markets this this are more accurate because the financial incentive makes people more likely to be truthful.

Many pollsters saw the race as a statistical dead head, whereas Kalshi, Polymarket and other betting platforms gave the Republican a roughly 65-35 lead. 

AP called the presidential results as Trump having 50.4 per cent and Harris having 48 per cent.

Trump will become the oldest president ever inaugurated, beating President Biden’s record by five months. 

The site has humble beginnings, with Coplan sharing a photo of his ‘office’ four years ago which was actually in his bathroom, with his laptop resting on a washing basket in front of a damaged door.

He captioned it: ‘2020, running out of money, solo founder, HQ in my makeshift bathroom office. little did I know Polymarket was going to change the world.’

The young entrepreneur has kept his personal political leanings under wraps, but he recently went for breakfast with the Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. 

He even shared a tweet showing Polymarket visuals displayed at RNC HQ in July.

X CEO Elon Musk shared an image of the odds showing Trump’s lead with the caption: ‘Trump now leading Kamala by 3 per cent in betting markets. More accurate than polls, as actual money is on the line.’

And Coplan later posted: ‘Polymarket helped people go to bed early on election night, Elon Musk included’ and ‘Elon being a Polymarket fan never gets old’.

When his site began to hit the headlines, he posted to clarify his company is ‘strictly non-partisan’.

‘We’re just market nerds who think prediction markets provide the public with a much needed alternative data source.

‘Polymarket is not about politics.’

Speaking on CNBC for his first TV interview, the curly-haired founder said he feels a ‘sense of victory’.

He said: ‘I understand it is a novel concept and people were skeptical, but hopefully people will come around and be more embracing of market-based information.

‘The thing that is undeniable is that Polymarket was the first destination to convey that Trump and won. It was a good two, three hours ahead of the media.

‘We were in the office, looking at the odds and it seemed like a done deal.’

He went on to say while smiling ‘I apologize to the pollsters, I hope we didn’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 that people were celebrating while looking at his site as ‘humbling’. 

Kalshi, Polymarket and other betting platforms have quickly emerged as a way to legally put money on elections and gauge who’s ahead, after successive cycles in which pollster forecasts crashed and burned.

How it works is that bettors place ‘trades’ on a candidate and get a payout if they back the correct outcome. More and bigger bets on a front-runner raise that candidate’s odds, while at the same time reducing bettors’ returns.

Together, those platforms ended up with a purse of some $450 million as of Tuesday evening. On its own, Kalshi took $1 billion in total volume of bets on the 2024 race, says Mansour.

Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi, said the results validated his fledgling industry, which predicted a Harris defeat weeks earlier – and also correctly called the race for Trump before the major news networks early on Wednesday morning.

‘The markets were right. The markets outperformed,’ Mansour told DailyMail.com. ‘The markets are going to be the thing that people look at next cycle. They’re not going back.’

The markets are ‘not a crystal ball,’ Mansour said, but are better than pollsters at pulling together the wisdom of the crowd.

It quickly became clear that the betting markets were on the money.

Polling, which involves canvassing voters about how they plan to vote and then processing that data, had suggested a tight race, including in the seven swing states that decided the contest.

But they undercounted Trump’s support nationwide, and by as much as four percentage points in such battlegrounds as North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, as of the count on Friday.

In a particularly egregious example, Ann Selzer’s election eve poll in Iowa, which gave Harris an unlikely lead in a reliably red state, was off by a whopping 17 points.

Kalshi and other markets had given Trump a discernible lead since the beginning of October. The prediction tightened at the beginning of November, but Harris was most often down on her rival by at least 10 points.

Betting directly on elections is restricted in the US.

But such platforms as Kalshi, PredictIt and Polymarket, are not strictly gambling sites – they get around the restrictions by serving as venues 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 restricts US-based users from taking part, but crafty bettors 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 keep making wagers until the bet closes out, which occurred the electoral college was for Trump early on Wednesday.

The payout was estimated at $287 million Tuesday evening.

The Polymarket bettor set for the biggest 2024 race payout is a Paris-based investor known as the ‘Polymarket whale’ who made $40 million worth of Trump-related bets on the site. He will walk away with $80 million, according to his accounts on the site.