He upended political polling by creating the billion-dollar betting platform Polymarket. But is it legal?

By Jen Wieczner, New York features writer who covers Wall Street, business, and crypto

Photo: Dina Litovsky

Photo: Dina Litovsky

Photo: Dina Litovsky

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At 6 a.m. on Wednesday, November 13, eight FBI agents in black windbreakers burst through the door of Shayne Coplan’s Soho apartment with a battering ram, surprising him and his girlfriend in bed. They seized his phone from the bedside table but wouldn’t let him touch it, not even to unlock it, lest he destroy evidence that might criminally implicate him or his company, Polymarket, the popular betting platform that over a week before had set off celebrations at Mar-a-Lago when it showed Donald Trump winning the presidential election well before the networks did. After grabbing both his and his girlfriend’s devices, the FBI spent hours sifting through his belongings and eclectic art collection. Coplan popped up on X later that day to write, “new phone, who dis?”

His irreverence can be partly explained by the fact that the raid was not his first run-in with the government, which Coplan has been fighting almost since he started Polymarket in his “bathroom office” on the Lower East Side five years ago, when he was just 21 years old. Polymarket is unlike other gambling forums in that it’s not a bookie and it doesn’t set the odds of its markets. Each market is simply structured as a question on which you can bet “yes” or “no.” Will Volodymyr Zelenskyy apologize to Trump? Will Fyre Festival 2 sell out? Will TikTok be banned again before May? The question that first catapulted Coplan, a New York University dropout, into being an unlikely main character of the 2024 election was whether Joe Biden would quit the race, wh