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In case you need any more proof of the power of prediction markets, check out what happened this morning.

For the past three months, Venezuelan opposition leader and activist María Corina Machado had trailed Donald Trump and Yulia Navalnaya in the odds to win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

But the winds around Machado shifted drastically about 12 hours out from the official announcement, livestreamed on YouTube earlier this morning.

So, the Polymarket hivemind successfully predicted the Nobel Prize Winner a whole half-day before the announcement. Hah!

💵 Wallet wisdom

Someone skeptical might wonder whether someone on the inside at the Nobel Peace Prize has a Polymarket account. 

To which I would say, no idea! But the way things are going, if there wasn’t rampant insider trading at the Nobel this year, maybe next (I kid). 

Perhaps there was some other signal that some whale picked up on, and that momentum snowballed. 

But it’s Friday, so let’s go with a different tack.

It’s official: The ability of foresight is well on its way to freedom, democratized from the greedy mitts of the quants, actuaries and brainiac analysts and projected onto our price feeds.

A lot of that seems to have come down to the obsessive energy of Shayne Coplan, Polymarket’s 27-year-old founder and CEO, whose Bloomberg recently labeled the youngest self-made billionaire on record.

“We’ve known him for a long time,” Rob Hadick (Dragonfly) told Yano and Santi on today’s Empire podcast. Dragonfly was the largest investor in one of Polymarket’s earlier funding rounds.

“We’ve been believers in him as an entrepreneur since the beginning. He’s got such incredible ambition — maniacal focus, even during the worst of the bear markets in ‘22 and ‘23. He just was always convinced that he was going to create a generational company, which will create the markets for everything.”

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What exactly has made Coplan so effective at bringing prediction markets to life, if prior iterations like Augur never really made it?

“ So Shane, if you spend time with him — people will laugh at me for saying this — but he has aura,” Yano said on Empire. “He has a way of carrying himself.”

“And actually I've talked to ex-Polymarket people who helped build Polymarket with him. And I was like, ‘What's Shane's deal? Is he really a good engineer?’ ‘They're like, ‘oh, no, not at all.’”

“Is he like an amazing product designer?”

“They're like, ‘He does product design, but he is not world-class at it. He just drives the company forward. He’s got a way, a vibe of doing it that makes other people want to be around him.’”

Yano then recounted a dinner with the All-In podcast crew — Chamath, Calacanis, and so on — in Miami. “And Shane walked into the room and it was like Trump had walked into the room. I mean, everyone basically — there’s all these famous people in the room — everyone goes towards him.”

And now you know.

Last time, we asked: “What crypto app should CZ use for the first time next?”

Only 20% of you said “Polymarket,” while twice as many said “Tornado Cash” and “Pudgy Party.” Go figure!

This week, I’m wondering: