A fun fact: Polymarket has been around for 6 years now. To the public, it seems like it became an overnight sensation as the Web3 project that truly achieved PMF. But the truth is, 21-year-old founder Shayne Coplan (who was secretly coding from his apartment bathroom at the time) endured countless industry cycles: the DeFi Summer frenzy, the crypto winter triggered by the Luna/FTX collapse, the rise and fall of the NFT bubble, and the early institutional bull market after the Bitcoin ETF approval… The team stayed “low-key and under the radar” almost the entire time, even while dealing with a $1.4M fine from the CFTC in 2022 and a forced ban on U.S. users, which left them no choice but to shift their focus to global non-U.S. markets. They kept pushing through, and finally, the turning point came with the 2024 U.S. presidential election: platform trading volume exploded, with a single election market racking up over $3.6 billion in total transactions (far surpassing traditional polling and betting platforms). Its accuracy crushed mainstream polls, making it the go-to “real public opinion pricing tool” cited by media outlets like CNN and Bloomberg. In 2025, they finally received a no-action letter to re-enter the U.S. market, and NYSE parent company ICE invested $200M (pushing its valuation to the $8-9B range), with monthly trading volume easily surpassing $1B+. Polymarket’s six years are also the six years of the prediction market track. Now, everyone is finally seeing how thriving the prediction market space has become.