The session was a 30-minute fireside chat on the OKX Main Stage, moderated by Balaji Srinivasan, founder of The Network State, according to the conference agenda. It was not livestreamed. The account of it below comes from attendees posting from the room.
How Stock Should Work
Coplan said Polymarket is “exploring an on-chain asset tied to Polymarket’s economics that also has real programmatic utility,” which he called “how the idea of stock should work,” according to Car, a Polymarket trader posting from the session. He said Polymarket would like to be the first to do it right, and repeated that the remarks were not legal or financial advice.
A second attendee, StuPredicts, described the same exchange as an onchain asset that could represent “some economics in the company” while also carrying programmatic utility, with no structure confirmed. Neither account reports Coplan using the word token.
ICE And Onchain Stocks
Coplan said Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is one of Polymarket’s largest shareholders and is working with regulators on onchain stocks, according to Wu Blockchain and PANews, both posting from the conference.
ICE said in October 2025 it would invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion pre-money valuation, become a global distributor of Polymarket’s event data, and partner on future tokenization work. It has since deployed close to that full amount, after another $600 million in March.
There Will Be News
On bringing onchain financial applications into the U.S. legally, Coplan said: “It’s not news, but there will be news… coming soon,” StuPredicts reported. Nothing was attached to it.
He described the business as a regulated U.S. exchange and clearinghouse that is “about to have an FCM,” or futures commission merchant, alongside the international decentralized finance platform. Polymarket has sought full approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, for its main platform, and applied for the license that would let it offer margin trading.
Sports Funds The Experiments
Coplan described sports as the distribution engine rather than the destination, bringing the users, volume and revenue that let Polymarket fund more experimental markets, StuPredicts reported. He said he wants market creation opened up so that people outside the company can list and experiment with markets, with liquidity, rules and price discovery at scale as the constraint.
He also said he wants Polymarket to price risks that carry no market price at all, on the argument that even a thin prediction market produces a reference price that can inform larger over-the-counter trades, swaps and block trades elsewhere.
A Ledger Of Record
Srinivasan introduced the idea of retroarchy, inverting Robin Hanson’s futarchy: prediction markets as a record of the past rather than a tool for deciding the future. A resolved market leaves behind what people expected, how those expectations moved and what happened. Srinivasan called it a ledger of record. Coplan said a prediction market becomes a verification market once the outcome is known.
Asked about the 2024 election, Coplan said that after Joe Biden’s debate performance the market priced him dropping out while much of the commentary insisted he would stay, and that he saw two outcomes: Biden stays and prediction markets lose credibility, or Biden drops out and Polymarket gets its largest validation. “I was like, fuck,” he said, per StuPredicts.
Coplan has a second TOKEN2049 appearance scheduled for Thursday on the Institutional stage, StuPredicts said.
