A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote a big story. Polymarket is the biggest prediction market in the world. The newspaper said that Polymarket paid many social media creators. The company asked them to make videos. In the videos, the creators put a lot of money on bets and won. But the videos were not real. The creators did not use the real website. They used fake pages that looked almost the same. The newspaper looked at 118 videos. In these videos, the creators celebrated about 900,000 dollars in wins. But the same bets in real life would lose more than 166,000 dollars.
So here is the problem. People say this platform shows the truth, because many people put their money on it. But the company built a fake picture of that truth, because the real one was not good enough.
This is not only one bad story. It brings up the big question about all prediction markets: do they read the future, or do they shape it?
What Is a Prediction Market?
The idea is simple. In a prediction market, people use real money. They bet on a question: will this thing happen or not? For example, “This person will win the election,” or “This will happen before this date.” People buy and sell these bets. The price shows how possible the crowd thinks the event is.
If we forget the betting part, these markets can give us a lot of information. In a normal survey, people do not have to tell the truth. But when their money is on the table, they think more carefully.
For this reason, people talked about prediction markets as a tool to see the future. In the last few years, they became big. Before, only a small group in the crypto world knew about them. Today, Polymarket works with Yahoo Finance and Substack. It also works with Dow Jones, the owner of the Wall Street Journal. This is strange: the newspaper that found the fake videos was the Wall Street Journal. So the company was exposed by the newspaper of its own business partner.
The King of the Sector
Polymarket and its founder Shayne Coplan are in the centre of this world. People call Coplan the youngest “self-made” billionaire. He started the company alone in 2020. The story says he started it in his bathroom. It is a clean, inspiring startup story.
But the platform also has a long list of scandals. Some people said that traders used secret information. This is called insider trading. The problem became so serious that the US Congress started an investigation. The Trump family has close links with these platforms. Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor for Polymarket and also for Kalshi, its competitor. At the same time, he is an investor in Polymarket through his own venture capital company, 1789 Capital. Some bets came at a “surprisingly good time,” just before important Trump decisions, for example about Iran. Even big newspapers talk about this openly.
But nobody really controls these markets. They mostly control themselves. This is why the fake video story is important. A system that says it puts a price on the truth can also produce the truth.
Who Is in the Centre of the Network?
There are many links, investments and names here. So we ask a normal question: who is in the centre? When we look back, we always find the same place.
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was one of the early investors in Polymarket. Joey Krug is another important name. He got a scholarship from Thiel. First, he started Augur, a prediction market on Ethereum. Later, he joined Founders Fund. The line from Augur to Polymarket is interesting.
We made a lot of content about Thiel, so this is not a surprise for you. Some time ago, we tried to understand why he does these things. We talked about Palantir, about his ideas on surveillance, and about the thoughts he does not often share in public. At that time, we did not know about the Polymarket link, and we stayed neutral about his intentions. Now we have one more piece. This does not mean “here is the answer.” We only know more details now.
A Deep History
The idea of prediction markets is also old and interesting. In 2003, DARPA, the research part of the US Department of Defense, worked on a project. Its name was Policy Analysis Market. The plan was to use a market to put a price on political problems, military movements and similar events before they happened. The press called it the “Terrorism Futures Market.” Many people were angry, and the program closed in July 2003. One more note: Turkey was one of the test countries in this program.
Robin Hanson, an academic, designed this program. And in 2019, before he started Polymarket, Coplan contacted Hanson directly. This is not proof of an “operation”; we do not have data for that. But it is a real, documented contact. It is not small enough to ignore.
The Same Way of Thinking
The real bridge here is not technical. It is an idea. DARPA described its program like this: stop surprises, see future events early. Palantir came from the same DARPA world, and Thiel started it. Its founding idea is almost exactly the same.
So surveillance software and prediction markets look like two children in the same family. One reads your data. The other reads the bets of the crowd. But they both want the same thing: to know the future early. We saw this way of thinking when we talked about Palantir. Now it is in front of us again, this time in the clothes of betting.
Now Meta
And here is the newest piece. The New York Times says that Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, told his employees to build a prediction market app, like Polymarket and Kalshi. The app is called Arena. In the beginning, it will not use real money. It will use points, like a game. But the company does not say no to real money in the future.
This shows something clearly. A system stayed on the side for years, and now it is coming to the surface. When a company with billions of users sits at this table, the size of everything changes.
I only want to leave one question here. In the past, we knew Meta from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In that story, user data was used to shape people’s opinions. Now the same company enters a market that puts a price on opinions. There is no proven link between these two things. But it is difficult not to ask the question.
The Idea Behind It
Behind all of this, there is an idea, and it is not only about money. Robin Hanson wrote about it years ago, and that article influenced Coplan the most. The name of the idea is “futarchy.” In simple words, it means: use prediction markets as a way to govern. “We vote on values, but we bet on beliefs.” So we give public decisions to the markets.
This idea is not an accident. It is close to another idea: technology is the best way to push change without waiting for the agreement of the people. When we tried to understand Thiel’s philosophy, we met these ideas. Now we can see where they go today. In this picture, prediction markets are not only betting platforms. They are the first model of a decision system.
But Why?
We asked again and again, “Why does Thiel do these things?” But honestly, we did not find a clear answer. Today we have links that we did not have before. But the main question is still open.
Maybe all of this is simple: a small group of people know each other, and the same idea came to them at different times. Or maybe someone built something quietly, and now it is ready to come to the surface. We started with the Wall Street Journal story about the fake betting videos. Maybe the real bet is not about this: do these markets read the future? Maybe it is about this: will they write it?