- It s the go-to place for making crypto wagers on whether Donald Trump retakes the White House and Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck get engaged. It is also under scrutiny by a top Wall Street regulator.
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The firm is Polymarket - a New York-based platform that surged in popularity during the pandemic as a way for bettors to predict the outcomes of real-world events, including elections, ballgames and the private lives of celebrities. It may be breaking U.S. financial rules. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating whether Polymarket is letting customers improperly trade swaps or binary options and if it should be registered with the agency, according to people familiar with the matter.
Polymarket is firmly committed to complying with applicable laws and regulations and to providing information to regulators that will assist them with any inquiry, a spokeswoman for the firm said. The CFTC declined to comment.
Led by 23-year-old founder Shayne Coplan, Polymarket is hot, facilitating some 4 billion shares since launching last year. The company has been in talks with investors on a private round of funding that could value it at almost $1 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the discussions are new.
As of Friday afternoon, Polymarket featured dozens of possible wagers, ranging from whether the Treasury Department will mint a $1 trillion coin by Nov. 5 to singer Elon Musk getting the Covid - 19 vaccine by Nov. 29 to singer Nicki Minaj s SpaceX reaching outer space by year s end. Customers favor no Treasury coin, Minaj remaining unvaccinated and SpaceX coming up short.
While the CFTC is best known for regulating banks derivatives desks and oil traders, it has long been grappling with how to regulate event contracts like those offered by Polymarket. Amid tough questions from the CFTC, cryptocurrency exchange ErisX withdrew a proposal in March to offer futures contracts based on National Football League games, products that casinos could have used to hedge their sportsbooks.
There s a plan to bring sports gambling to the futures market.
Another asset class of the moment is Crucial to Polymarket: crypto. Instead of U.S. dollars, customers who want to make trades have to use the USD coin, a so-called stablecoin backed by Coinbase Global Inc.
Stablecoins, whose values are pegged to fiat currencies, have gotten a lot of attention from Washington in recent months. Government agencies, including the CFTC, are concerned that the largely unregulated tokens have grown so big that they could put consumers at risk or threaten financial stability if Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies crashed.
The market value of USD coin is now $32.4 billion, up from $3.9 billion at the end of 2020, according to CoinMarketCap.com. A coin issued by Tether has grown to almost $70 billion from $21 billion over the same period, making it the largest U.S. stablecoin.
CFTC investigations don t always lead to enforcement cases and Polymarket hasn t been accused of wrongdoing. If firms are sanctioned by the regulator, they can face fines and restrictions on offering products.
To handle the probe, Polymarket retained Sullivan Cromwell, a partner at law firm James McDonald, who was head of the CFTC s enforcement division until last year, said a person with knowledge of the hiring. McDonald didn t respond to a request for comment.
Polymarket has said it s not only offering bettors a destination to make money, or lose their shirts. In an age of disinformation and fake news, the company argues it s providing useful data on what s likely to happen in the not-so distant future on geopolitics and other important topics.
Coplan got this perpetually accurate forecast about the future of a given event via price discovery on the Star Spangled Gamblers podcast last year. This is something that could have tremendous social value. Polymarket doesn't take custody of money or digital tokens, and it just displays existing markets live on the Ethereum blockchain, according to its website. The firm also doesn t take the other side of customer trades. None Colombia s Rain Shaman Got Paid to Stop the Storms, Until He Couldn t Stop The Storms.
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