Traders who placed bets on a victory for Donald Trump in the US election have raked in huge sums on the cryptocurrency trading platform Polymarket, including one anonymous financier who made an estimated $85million.
The crypto betting site beat the pollsters and ‘called the election before anything else’, its 26-year-old founder Shayne Coplan declared on November 6.
Among those who reaped the biggest rewards from the result was the so-called ‘Trump Whale’, a French national who calls himself Théo.
The financier relied on predictions from niche ‘neighbour polls’, including ones he commissioned himself, meaning he effectively bet against the accuracy of US polling data.
He was so confident that the Republican would win the race that he reportedly staked $30 million of his own money on it, at the same time as Polymarket contradicted traditional polls by swinging heavily in favour of a Trump victory.
The crypto entrepreneur – a New York University dropout – boasted that his app had helped Musk and others ‘to go to bed early on election night’ due to its ‘early call’
A screenshot of the Polymarket odds predicting Trump’s victory
The ‘Trump Whale’ was so confident that the Republican would win the race that he reportedly staked $30 million of his own money on it
According to the financier, traditional polls failed to account for the ‘shy Trump voter effect’ – voters who supported the former president but who were not willing to share their views publicly or with pollsters.
When he placed his bets, the odds of Trump winning were 40 per cent, but his bet was by no means based on a gut feeling, he told the Wall Street Journal.
He had commissioned his own surveys to measure what is known as the ‘neighbour effect’ – asking people not who they are voting for but who they think those next door are.
Théo slammed the polls put out by mainstream media outlets, saying they underestimated Trump and were skewed in favour of the Democrats.
‘In France this is different!! The pollster credibility is more important: they want to be as close as possible to the actual results. Culture is different on this,’ he told reporters.
He insisted that he was in no way trying to manipulate the election with his huge bet, telling the WSJ: ‘My intent is just making money’.
Many election watchers kept their eyes on Polymarket during the race for the White House, with the odds splashed across X and shared by Elon Musk as evidence of momentum for Trump.
‘More accurate than polls, as actual money is on the line,’ Musk said on X in October, sharing the latest data from Coplan’s app.
The crypto entrepreneur – a New York University dropout – boasted that his app had helped Musk and others ‘to go to bed early on election night’ due to its ‘early call’.
‘The night of the election, Polymarket was the first destination to convey that Trump had won,’ he told CNBC. ‘It was a good two, three hours ahead of the media.’
‘On Polymarket it looked like a done deal, and if you were just watching TV, you would think it’s neck and neck,’ says Polymarket CEO Shayne Caplan on the platform’s early call for Trump on Election Day.
Despite endorsements from high-profile Trump backers Musk and Peter Thiel, who was among investors who helped the platform raise $70million this year, Coplan has insisted that Polymarket is ‘strictly non-partisan’.
Writing on X, he said the site is ‘not about politics. The vision never was to be a political website, and it still isn’t’.
While traders on Polymarket went the right way betting on Trump’s victory, most favoured Harris to win the popular vote – which he went on to win.
Betting on Polymarket surged as traders rushed to wager on the US presidential election, with more than $3.6 billion in trading volume for predictions on the winner, according to data shared by the platform.
Bookmakers have bet on the outcomes of elections for centuries – Polymarket is different because it operates as more of a financial exchange, with traders buying and selling digital contracts with one another.
While gambling markets have historically been effective at indicating election results, they have on occasion been dramatically wrong, including during the Brexit vote in 2016.
The site has humble beginnings, with Coplan sharing a photo of his ‘office’ four years ago which was actually in his bathroom, with his laptop resting on a washing basket
Polymarket and other betting platforms have quickly emerged as a way to legally put money on elections and gauge who’s ahead, after successive cycles in which pollster forecasts crashed and burned.
People place ‘trades’ on a candidate and get a payout if they back the correct outcome. More and bigger bets on a front-runner raise that candidate’s odds, while at the same time reducing peoples’ returns.
Betting directly on elections is restricted in the US.
But platforms such as Kalshi, PredictIt and Polymarket, are not strictly gambling sites – they get around the restrictions by serving as venues for trading contracts on future outcomes.
Kalshi became the first legal prediction market in the US thanks to a federal appeals court ruling last month.
Polymarket says it restricts US-based users from taking part, and it has a large usership abroad in countries like France. However, many users in the country get around that by using a tool known as a VPN, which can hide their location.
Tarek Mansour, CEO of betting platform Kalshi, said the results validated his fledgling industry, which predicted a Harris defeat weeks earlier – and also correctly called the race for Trump before the major news networks early on Wednesday morning.
‘The markets were right. The markets outperformed,’ Mansour told DailyMail.com.
‘The markets are going to be the thing that people look at next cycle. They’re not going back.’
Donald Trump with wife, Melania, and son Barron on Election night. The prediction markets eyed Trump’s lead among voters ahead of the polls
The markets are ‘not a crystal ball,’ Mansour said, but are better than pollsters at pulling together the wisdom of the crowd.
It quickly became clear that the betting markets were on the money.
Polling, which involves canvassing voters about how they plan to vote and then processing that data, had suggested a tight race, including in the seven swing states that decided the contest.
But they undercounted Trump’s support nationwide, and by as much as four percentage points in such battlegrounds as North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, as of the count on Friday.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
