At 27, Shayne Coplan has become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. His estimated 11% stake in Polymarket, the blockchain-based prediction platform he founded in 2020, is now worth at least $1 billion. New York Stock Exchange parent company, Intercontinental Exchange, announced it poured $2 billion into the firm at a $9 billion valuation—in exchange for a 20% stake, according to PitchBook.

The deal caps a meteoric ascent for Polymarket, which was valued at just $1.2 billion earlier this year and has quietly become crypto’s fastest-growing startup. “This is the fastest and largest valuation growth that we've seen in crypto,” says Rob Hadick, general partner at venture capital firm Dragonfly, which has invested in Polymarket.

Coplan also revealed two previously undisclosed funding rounds totaling $205 million that drew a billionaire-studded roster of backers: in addition to early investors Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia (net worth: $7.6 billion) and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, the new rounds brought on Figma cofounder Dylan Field ($3.7 billion), Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus ($1.5 billion), Uber’s Travis Kalanick ($3.6 billion) and hedge fund veteran Glenn Dubin ($2.9 billion), as well as Peter Thiel’s ($26.5 billion) Founders Fund and Coinbase, cofounded and run by CEO Brian Armstrong ($16.2 billion). Even Philadelphia Eagles star running back Saquon Barkley became an angel investor in Polymarket last year.

Alongside its investment, ICE will become the “global distributor of Polymarket’s event-driven data” and has agreed “to partner on future tokenization initiatives,” helping bring prediction markets and crypto into the financial mainstream, according to a Tuesday press release. Polymarket and ICE declined to provide additional details but said they will be shared during ICE’s Q3 earnings call on October 30.

“Many hedge funds already use Polymarket odds as inputs into their models—now those odds will flow........

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