After the World Cup, Polymarket's monthly active users have halved.

Written by: momo, ChainCatcher

Today, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan announced that former Zora CEO Jacob Horne has officially joined the team, responsible for product work, with a focus on DeFi business. This is already the fourth key executive Polymarket has brought in within just over a month.

On the other hand, the rapid decline in Polymarket's trading data is concerning. Data from The Block shows that after the conclusion of the World Cup, Polymarket's total trading volume, including its U.S. platform, fell from a peak of $14.74 billion in June to $12.89 billion in July, and further dropped to $8.41 billion in August, a decrease of 40% over two months; the number of monthly active traders simultaneously fell from 667,400 to 336,300, also nearly halving.

Amid this significant drop in trading activity, Polymarket has been making frequent moves. What exactly is it anxious about? What strategies is it implementing?

In just one month, gaining 4 executives, what is Polymarket trying to supplement?

In just over a month, Polymarket has continuously attracted 4 key executives.

In August, former Uber and Bird founder Travis VanderZanden joined to oversee growth; in September, former Amazon, EA, Delta, and Nielsen executive Warren Jenson became Polymarket's first CFO; former DoorDash general manager and Chief of Staff to Ray Dalio at Bridgewater, Collin McKinney Hill joined to manage operations; the most recent addition is former Zora CEO Jacob Horne, responsible for product development with a focus on advancing DeFi.

Three months ago, Polymarket also brought in Shana Bautista to oversee global research and intelligence. She previously worked at the FBI and also at Coinbase, primarily handling investigations and monitoring risks involving anomalous trading, market manipulation, and insider trading.

Looking at these 5 resumes together, Polymarket's intent in this wave of management changes becomes relatively clear: it is supplementing a more mature set of capabilities in growth, product, operations, finance, and market security for the next phase of expansion.

The immediate pressure for this intensive overhaul comes from business competition. Media analyses from Bloomberg, Reuters, and others indicate that Polymarket's recent intensive executive appointments are directly related to chasing its main competitor, Kalshi. Kalshi has established a significant advantage in high-frequency categories like sports, with an overall trading volume share exceeding 70% at one point; meanwhile, the trading activity on Polymarket has quickly receded after the World Cup excitement wore off.

The addition of growth-oriented executives like Travis VanderZanden largely aims to resolve a real issue: how Polymarket can rediscover growth once the influx from super events wanes.

However, the pressure does not only stem from competition in the U.S. market; Polymarket's own on-chain product also has issues.

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has admitted that as the company's scale has expanded, the performance of its on-chain products has "declined," and Polymarket's DeFi team has publicly acknowledged that there is a significant amount of technical debt in its existing central limit order book. Although the team has expanded the system tenfold and increased speed threefold, the underlying architecture still has problems, and they are currently rewriting the matching engine from scratch.

This is only a part of the business pressure. Since Polymarket's return to the U.S. market last year, the regulatory and compliance requirements it faces have become even higher than before. This perhaps also explains why someone like Shana Bautista entered Polymarket. This year, the CFTC has launched an investigation into Polymarket's marketing practices; previous reports of the platform using content creators to produce fake trades and fake profit videos for promotion have also attracted regulatory scrutiny. Meanwhile, Polymarket has been continuously recruiting compliance and risk management talents from institutions like Robinhood and Nasdaq.

Warren Jenson becoming the first CFO resembles another piece of the puzzle; Polymarket has entered a stage that requires more systematic capital and financial management. Especially as the company prepares to further expand its business in the U.S. and globally, while also seeking a new round of large-scale financing, Jenson will need to be involved in long-term financial planning and company strategy.

This can also be seen from capital movements. In August, the New York Stock Exchange's parent company, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), indicated that it is considering participating in Polymarket's new round of financing; in September, 1789 Capital was reported to plan to invest about $300 million in a round of approximately $1 billion financing. If the deal goes through, Polymarket's valuation will reach around $21 billion.

Therefore, when looking at this wave of executive changes, the logic behind it is not complicated: on one hand, there’s the direct competition from Kalshi, the growth pressure after the World Cup, and the need to address issues within its on-chain products; on the other hand, there are the higher regulatory, compliance, and capital demands following its return to the U.S. market.

Polymarket has mostly relied on founder and product-driven growth in the past, but as the company starts to enter the mainstream U.S. market and compete for larger trading volumes, the issues it faces are those of a large fintech company.

Polymarket begins to change users' reasons for opening the platform

Aside from personnel, Polymarket's strategy is also evolving concurrently.

In the past, Polymarket's traffic largely relied on events. Elections, the World Cup, central bank decisions, popular sports events.... When a sufficiently large event occurs, users flock in; when the event ends, interest fades and trading cools off. The World Cup has proven the growth limit of this model and has exposed its cyclicality.

Thus, the real problem Polymarket needs to solve is how to give users a reason to open the platform even when there are no super events.

From recent months’ actions, Polymarket is attempting to provide its own answer.

• On June 27, Polymarket acquired the productivity application Craft Agents, and part of the core team subsequently joined Polymarket.
• On July 29, the Polymarket Institute was established, fully funded by Polymarket, and operated in a way similar to university donations. Beyond the trading platform, Polymarket has begun to invest in academic research and theoretical construction of prediction markets;
• On September 3, Polymarket officially launched Perps perpetual contracts, covering markets like crypto assets, precious metals, energy, and major U.S. stock indices, supporting up to 20x leverage. This means Polymarket is starting to further cut into higher frequency trading scenarios;
• On September 8, the Squads social feature was launched. Users can create exclusive spaces within the platform to discuss markets, share predictions, and directly participate in trading with friends, allowing discussions that originally occurred in off-platform communities to be integrated into trading products themselves.

The long-term impact of Perps, Squads, and research institutions on the prediction market ecosystem still needs time to verify. But if these actions truly belong to the same direction, then what Polymarket aims to expand is not merely a few new trading categories, but the entire pathway for users to enter the platform.

In the past, users might have come here because of an event they cared about. Now, it seems Polymarket hopes that users can find a reason to open the platform even without a specific event, to trade assets, discuss markets, seek opinions, and even bring more behaviors that originally occurred outside the platform inside.

The evolution from a single tool to an ecosystem hub reveals an ambition that is the most noteworthy aspect of Polymarket's current expansion.

Moreover, the prediction market serves as a rather special entry point for users; it is not limited to crypto users, offering a larger pool of traffic. According to Cointelegraph, a study of approximately 857,000 active Polymarket users found that about 60% of the first-time World Cup investors had never interacted with blockchain protocols before.

Therefore, with Polymarket’s recent continuous supplements to products, trading, and social functions, providing more markets, higher frequency trading tools, and social features, allowing users to have more activities to engage in after entering the platform, Polymarket's future is clearly not limited to crypto and prediction markets.