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Fantoms SpiritSwap V2 is LIVE — UI & protocol upgrades

Users can now enjoy V2 via the following link: beta.spiritswap.finance

SpiritSwap has come a long way since its inception on the Fantom network one year ago. This past year has been full of highs and lows but at the end of the day the Spirit team has loved sharing every minute of this journey with you all! To celebrate our continued ingenuity and drive to consistently add value to the Fantom ecosystem, SpiritSwap is pleased to present V2 and subsequent protocol upgrades.

This project in itself has been a monumental effort by our development team, all coordinated by our core team members in their respective fields. This product is a result from months of blood, sweat, tears and a severe lack of sleep. To start, SpiritSwap would like to thank everyone involved in the development of this major overhaul.

This article explains our reasons for the V2 upgrade, what the upgrade entails, the key differences between V1 & V2, along with the architectural upgrades to the AMM infrastructure and the underlying updates to some of the contracts.

The work doesn’t stop here. Upon deploying V2, the team will be getting straight to work on V2.1 upgrades, which consist of functionality upgrades that would have taken too long to implement in the V2 rollout, balance is key.

V2 TLDR 1 minute ;
>New AMMs in the mix

>Protocol Fees: Giving back to the protocols, whenever a protocol lists with us, SpiritSwap rebates protocols` 25% of the fees their pools generate

>Implementation of a master router. This means we can add new AMMs (like balancer weighted and linear or concentrated AMMs) without having to upgrade our UI or contracts.

>Fee reduction from 0.3% to 0.18% for Classic AMM (customizable fees down to 0.01%)

>Stable AMM introduced at 0.04% fees (customizable fees down to 0.01%)

>More fees for inSPIRIT holders from 0.05% — 0.135% (Includes both base fee and vote fee)

>Non-dilutive tokenomics for inSPIRIT holders through ve(3,3) model

>Making the inSPIRIT model more sustainable: Using a mix of solidly voting models

>Introduction of Permissionless Spirit farms

> In-built bribe UI

> Gauge proxy divided into 3 isolated gauge proxies for greater balance of emissions

V2.1 TLDR;
>Introduction of weighted pools

>Introduction of linear pools — better capital efficiency by feeding to lending network

>Introduction of Permissionless Ecosystem farms

> Upgrades to bribes (% based bribes, limit bribes)

V2 will be released in two stages. The first being a public beta, which is live as of today. This gives the public the ability to switch between V1 and V2 at their leisure. The current plan is for V2 beta to be live for 2 weeks, allowing the team to receive feedback and bug reports from the community. Over this time, the development team will dedicate 95 % of development resources to remedy any reported bugs from the community. Upon this round of community testing being complete, the team will redeploy our URL to face our V2 product thus making V2 our official application moving forward.

V2 TLDR 5 minutes :
Huge overhaul of fee structure with the aim to pass as much value back to inSPIRIT holders and protocols who support SpiritSwap.
Notably our vAMM fee has been reduced from 0.3% — 0.18%. This provides a positive feedback loop between aggregator traffic, volume and fees. The introduction of the new Vote Fee further rewards inSPIRIT holders who vote on gauges that have the ecosystem’s best interest at heart. The introduction of the Protocol Fee further incentivizes protocols to add liquidity with SpiritSwap, establishing a pool of deep liquidity for more optimal trade pricing.

Bridge swap upgrade:
SpiritSwap’s bridge aggregator will pave the way for a myriad of other chains to be added to the bridge. As a part of this upgrade, people will now be able to simultaneously swap while they bridge. For example, users can now send BNB from Binance Smart Chain to Fantom Opera, but in the same process, convert this BNB to FTM with one click.

We have 2 options — cheaper fees or faster transactions.

Bribe UI:
Isolated gauge proxies:
What was a “singular gauge proxy” for boosted farms, has now been segregated into 3 isolated gauge proxies for greater control over emissions on pairs that are crucial to the SpiritSwap ecosystem.

Running snapshots and facilitating airdrops for bribes is cumbersome and laborious. It’s not a good use of developer time. As such, the bribe process has been simplified for both developers and the community. Developers of projects who have gauges can now offer a bribe and set this up directly within our inSPIRIT UI. Subsequently, inSPIRIT holders who vote on farms with active bribes can also collect their voting fees directly within the inSPIRIT page, along with their inSPIRIT weekly rewards.

Isolated gauge proxies:

What was a “singular gauge proxy” for boosted farms, has now been segregated into 3 isolated gauge proxies for greater control over emissions on pairs that are crucial to the SpiritSwap ecosystem.

Real Yield — Anti dilution for inSPIRIT holders:
This aims to further stimulate the adoption of inSPIRIT for new and existing participants in our ecosystem. The Real Yield model sees emissions redirected to ensure loyal inSPIRIT holders are never diluted by farmers.

In depth overview 20 minutes
UI and codebase upgrades.
Soully has undergone some cosmetic surgery, SOME being an understatement. As you will notice, the entire layout of the SpiritSwap application has changed for a more simplified, crisp, clean and professional look. On top of this, we have rebuilt the ENTIRE code base from scratch, which is why V2 has been such a long drawn process.

In layman’s terms, by building this code ourselves (rather than relying on forked code) we understand the mechanics of this code much better, thus are able to execute a rapid turnaround time on fixing bugs and expediting deployment of new features. Needless to say the functionality of our DEX will now be much quicker than V1.

Offering a user interface that embodies the playful nature of Soully, while highlighting the key elements users expect from a DEX, is where inspiration came from. We wanted to keep things as minimalistic as possible, meanwhile offering the layers of detail that more seasoned DeFi users have come to expect from an aspiring tier 1 DEX.

The layout of the application was given careful consideration, specifically focusing on the flow of interaction. As users will notice, their journey within the application begins where all DeFi users would expect, their portfolio. Our home page now doubles as a portfolio page, which gives a detailed overview of all user positions including single held assets, LP positions, farm, winSPIRIT, lending and borrowing, as well as eventual ApeMode positions. This will offer all users a more enhanced overview of their positions on SpiritSwap and all key components / features that are offered as a protocol.

The new landing page will feature an overview of ALL key components that SpiritSwap brings to market. Included in these key components is user education, as a lot of users are new to defi. Ensuring users who arrive at our landing page have immediate access to information they need to make informed decisions is of immense importance. As such, when new users initially arrive at the landing page before entering the application, they are offered a myriad of information that details each individual feature via the ability to click on pop up infographic cards explaining the intricacy of each feature.

Basic AMM features like Swap, Bridge, Liquidity and Farms, still retain their standard functionality but with a new look and feel to the design. The focus was to keep as much of this functionality as familiar as possible for our existing users.

However you will notice that there are some new feature additions to farms and liquidity, which aligns with some of our new AMM architecture. These will be covered in a separate paragraph related to AMM upgrades.

The inSPIRIT page has also undergone a huge facelift, now offering far greater user experience. Users can now toggle between locking more SPIRIT or increasing their delegation period to eliminate any confusion. The process of locking inSPIRIT has now also been broken down into a simple 3 step process, replicating a walkthrough type approach for users participating in our inSPIRIT model. This makes the process seamless, easy to understand and eliminates any confusion for those who are new to the ecosystem or struggle to comprehend the process.

The farm voting panel has also been updated to offer improved UX via farm voting rebalance exclusion. Currently users must exclude farms they don’t want to vote for, otherwise vote percentages will automatically be rebalanced accordingly. This has led to a cumbersome and frustrating experience for V1 users and has been something we have strived to improve since the initial inSPIRIT deployment.

My farms toggle function: This allows users to automatically flip a switch that only displays their active farms in the voting panel. This improves UX as users no longer need to scroll through endless farms picking out the ones that are pertinent to their investment strategies, but rather streamline this approach by only displaying their active positions. This also helps users easily identify the most lucrative farms to vote for in order to capture the largest amount of voting fees.

AMM upgrades.
SpiritV2 will launch with two AMMs. A variable AMM (vAMM) for variable liquidity pairs (vLP) and a stable AMM (sAMM) for stable liquidity pairs (sLP). This AMM is a modified version of Solidly with an upgrade to the fee structure.

Our AMM architecture is preceded with a master router for swaps on SpiritV2. This means we can add new AMMs (like balancer weighted/linear pools or new types of AMMs) without having to upgrade our UI or contracts. They can just be added in the master router.

In this new AMM format, swap fees now accumulate outside of LP tokens in an LP Fee contract. This is unlike our old (UniV2) AMM in which fees are compounded directly into the LP tokens themselves. In this architecture each LP Pair contract has an associated LP Fee contract to handle this logic. Breaking out the accumulated swap fees from the LPs themselves allows us to implement our LP voting logic into the gauge system (more on that later).

The sAMM will allow for the ability to set different fees than the vAMM which Solidly didn't allow for. We see this as an opportunity to fix a broken system, which is why the SpiritSwap AMM’s offers variable fee functionality. The thought process here is that by utilizing the (X²+Y²)(XY)/2=K formula, we achieve a higher concentration of liquidity resulting in tighter spreads and lower impermanent loss. This means we can offer a far better execution on swaps (fees/slippage).

Further to this, SpiritSwap also achieves the ability to offer peg support, meaning SpiritSwap can now offer more effective pricing on stable trades, but also the ability to offer a more targeted solution to tokens that require peg maintenance. With this integration, winSPIRIT pairs will achieve more effective peg maintenance. This will now entice winSPIRIT pairs to stay where they belong and retain profitability on these pairs being traded, meaning inSPIRIT holders won’t miss out on the fees captured by any trading of inSPIRIT pairs that are currently based on other AMM’s.

By offering a more competitive pricing delivery on certain stable pairs, SpiritSwap will subsequently be more competitive in the aggregator space, meaning fees we were missing out on via DEX aggregation, will be a thing of the past.

Better pricing = more fees captured by proxy of DEX aggregation.

Further to this AMM architecture upgrade, SpiritSwap intends to add another layer of architecture to the mix in V2.1 that will allow for more enhanced trading functionality, offering the ability for us to bootstrap enhanced trader UI onto our front end. For now that update will remain as a surprise for a later day.

Fee structure:
The fee structure for SpiritSwap has also undergone some upgrades. The upgraded AMM has variable fees that can be updated by governance and can go as low as 0.01%. This will help us remain competitive with fees and we won’t have to redeploy even if our competitors lower their fees. Unlike Solidly, the vAMM and sAMM can have different fees, this makes sense because stable swaps should have lower fees than variable swaps because they incur less IL.

Moving forward, SpiritSwap will be reducing fees from 0.3% to 0.18% for our classic vAMM while establishing the ability to have an even more competitive fee for our new sAMM at a respectable 0.01%.

The reason for this stems from the realization that it’s better to capture a smaller slice of a bigger pie rather than trying to take the entire pie for ourselves. This update will see a more optimal pricing on trades, meaning that we capture a larger amount of aggregator traffic (fees that are currently being missed out on).

The distribution of fees has also undergone a change. The current model sees fees allocated as follows:

5 / 6 of fees are currently given back to LP’s

1 / 6 of fees are currently used to buy back SPIRIT at market rate and distribute to inSPIRIT holders during our weekly reward distribution.
vAMM & sAMM fee restructure:

Moving forward, Fees accumulate outside of LP token (unlike uniV2 which compounds fees directly into LP). Fees will be allocated as follows:

25 % will go to our base fee:
The base fee is exactly the same as the current inSPIRIT distribution. These are the SPIRIT rewards that all inSPIRIT holders collect at the end of each distribution epoch. It is pertinent to note that with the reduction in fee we are hopeful our routers will collect a higher volume of trade traffic from aggregators. Due to increased volume by virtue of a reduced fee, this increase in volume is expected to capture a higher distribution for inSPIRIT holders each week.

25% of fees will go to the new Protocol Fee model:

The protocol reward fee model is a rebate to protocols who list LP’s with us, for example Liquid Driver.

Out of all fees collected on Liquid Drivers liquidity pools, 25% of these will be given back to the protocol who lists with us (in this example Liquid Driver).

Read more at: https://spiritswap.medium.com/spiritswap-v2-is-live-ui-protocol-upgrades-bec064ebba61

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📰 7 Day Summary In Crypto: Upbit Hack, Vitalik's Privacy Push, and Zcash ETF Mania

A tumultuous week in the crypto world saw a major exchange hack, a significant privacy-focused donation from Ethereum's co-founder, and huge institutional moves around $ZEC. Here's a structured breakdown of the key market developments you need to know.

🚨 Exchange Security & Market Shakes

🔹 Upbit Hacked for \$36M in Solana-Based Assets
The South Korean exchange Upbit has confirmed a security breach involving suspicious transfers of assets on the Solana network.

▫️ Damage: Approximately \$36 Million worth of Solana-based assets were unauthorizedly transferred from the exchange's wallets at 04:42 on November 27, 2025.

▫️ Affected Assets: The list of affected tokens is extensive, including major assets like SOL, USDC, PYTH, JUP, JTO, BONK, and many others (2Z, ACS, DOOD, DRIFT, HUMA, IO, LAYER, ME, MEW, MOODENG, ORCA, PENGU, RAY, RENDER, SONIC, SOON, TRUMP, W).

▫️ Action: Upbit has stated it is taking measures to secure its systems and address the loss.

🌐 Privacy & Infrastructure...

00:00:06
It Comes Over Night🤯

StabilityAI Founder Emad Mostaque: Billionaires are building bunkers because they know AI unemployment will cause social collapse. He argues, the job losses start next year and nobody knows where they end. "it comes over night". Is there anyone left who denies the impact on labor market and society?

00:00:55
🚨Trump is Certainly Very Well Informed on UAP🚨

Grusch: I've Seen Intelligence Reports Featuring Photos of Craft and Bodies of Non-humans - Trump is Certainly Very Well Informed on UAP

(Partial and rushed transcript)

"There's some other things that are happening behind the scenes that I'll let the [Trump] administration discuss when they're ready."

Why are they here?

"Could it because we have interesting genetic material on Earth? We're a Jurassic Park tourist attraction for them? Could be a myriad of reasons."

Grusch: "I was, actually, partially cleared into some of those activities. It was beyond oral testimony provided to me. I actually had partial access to the data and actually read the intelligence reports resulting from those programs."

Baier: "With your own eyes? You saw it?"

Grusch: "Correct. Yes."

Baier: "Where's the evidence?"

Grusch: "Certainly members of this current administration are very well aware of this reality. Certainly, the current president is very knowledgeable on this subject, and I trust his leadership on it, and I think he's ...

00:07:49
👉 Coinbase just launched an AI agent for Crypto Trading

Custom AI assistants that print money in your sleep? 🔜

The future of Crypto x AI is about to go crazy.

👉 Here’s what you need to know:

💠 'Based Agent' enables creation of custom AI agents
💠 Users set up personalized agents in < 3 minutes
💠 Equipped w/ crypto wallet and on-chain functions
💠 Capable of completing trades, swaps, and staking
💠 Integrates with Coinbase’s SDK, OpenAI, & Replit

👉 What this means for the future of Crypto:

1. Open Access: Democratized access to advanced trading
2. Automated Txns: Complex trades + streamlined on-chain activity
3. AI Dominance: Est ~80% of crypto 👉txns done by AI agents by 2025

🚨 I personally wouldn't bet against Brian Armstrong and Jesse Pollak.

👉 Coinbase just launched an AI agent for Crypto Trading

XRP SUPPLY ON EXCHANGES IS DROPPING!

Over 180 MILLION $XRP have left exchanges recently, tightening available liquidity.

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🚨XDC Network is now formally a member of the AIMA🚨

XDC Network is now formally a member of the AIMA - The Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA), the world’s largest membership association for alternative investment managers.

This membership marks a significant milestone. By joining AIMA , XDC Network brings its enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure, real-world asset tokenisation experience, and hybrid architecture into the heart of discussions shaping the future of alternative investments.

Why it matters:

• Alternative investment managers are increasingly exploring tokenisation as a way to increase access, improve liquidity and operational efficiency. The latest AIMA research shows more than half of hedge funds now have awareness or interest in tokenised fund structures.

• With XDC’s track record in real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation, trade finance and enterprise-ready blockchain deployment, the network is well positioned to contribute in AIMA’s Digital Assets ...

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🚨Bernie Sanders Was Right About Banks🚨

Bernie Sanders was right about banks – but bank execs, you’re not the enemy.

1999’s repeal of Glass-Steagall made the biggest banks a bad deal for the 99%.

GenZ got their once-in-a-century chance to fix this.

In this week’s ZeroIn, Austin Campbell spells out how banking got broken and the two solutions that everyone is talking about:

• Boomers? "break the banks up"
• Zoomers? "bring in better options"

Put simply: the well has been poisoned in our current financial market structure debate by an inherent, unsolvable contradiction that we now have to confront.

Or, to present the problem in plain English: the big banks say that fair competition against them will collapse the system, to the detriment of the little guy and main street, while also massively overcharging the little guy and main street because they don't face market competition.

👉👉We may have to change the rules of the game to fix this.

https://zero-in.beehiiv.com/p/bernie-was-right

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XDC Network's acquisition of Contour Network

XDC Network's acquisition of Contour Network marks a silent shift to connect the digital trade infrastructure to real-time, tokenized settlement rails.

In a world where cross-border payments still take days and trap trillions in idle liquidity, integrating Contour’s trade workflows with XDC Network Blockchains' ISO 20022 financial messaging standard to bridge TradFi and Web3 in Trade Finance.

The Current State of Cross-Border Trade Settlements

Cross-border payments remain one of the most inefficient parts of global finance. For decades, companies have inter-dependency with banks and their correspondent banks across the world, forcing them to maintain trillions of dollars in pre-funded nostro and vostro balances — the capital that sits idle while transactions crawl across borders.

Traditional settlement is slow, often 1–5 days, and often with ~2-3% in FX and conversion fees. For every hour a corporation can’t access its own cash increases the cost of financing, tightens liquidity that could be used for other purposes, which in turn slows economic activity.

Before SWIFT, payments were fully manual. Intermediary banks maintained ledgers, and reconciliation across multiple institutions limited speed and volume.

SWIFT reshaped global payments by introducing a secure, standardized messaging infrastructure through ISO 20022 - which quickly became the language of money for 11,000+ institutions in 200 countries.

But SWIFT only fixed the messaging — not the movement. Actual value still moves through slow, capital-intensive correspondent chains.

Regulated and Compliant Stablecoin such as USDC (Circle) solves the part SWIFT never could: instant, on-chain settlement.

Stablecoin Settlement revamping Trade and Tokenization

Stablecoin such as USDC is a digital token pegged to the US Dollar, still the most widely used currency for trade, enabling the movement of funds instantly 24*7 globally - transparently, instantly, and without the need for any intermediaries and the need to lock in trillions of dollars of idle cash.

Tokenized settlement replaces multi-day reconciliation with on-chain finality, reducing:

  • Dependency on intermediaries
  • Operational friction
  • Trillions locked in idle liquidity

For corporates trapped in long working capital cycles, this is transformative.

Digital dollars like USDC make the process simple:

Fiat → Stablecoin → On-Chain Transfer → Fiat

This hybrid model is already widely used across remittances, payouts, and treasury flows.

But one critical piece of global commerce is still lagging:

👉 Trade finance.

The Missing link is still Trade Finance Infrastructure.

While payments innovation has raced ahead, trade finance infrastructure hasn’t kept up. Document flows, letters of credit, and supply-chain financing remain siloed, paper-heavy, and operationally outdated.

This is exactly where the next breakthrough will happen - and why the recent XDC Network acquisition of Contour is a silent revolution.

It transforms to a new era of trade-driven liquidity through an end-to-end digital trade from shipping docs to payment confirmation – one infrastructure that powers all.

The breakthrough won’t come from payments alone — it will come from connecting trade finance to real-time settlement rails.

The XDC + Contour Shift: A Silent Revolution

  • Contour already connects global banks and corporates through digital LCs and digitized trade workflows.
  • XDC Blockchain brings a settlement layer built for speed, tokenization, and institutional-grade interoperability and ISO 20022 messaging compatibility

Contour’s digital letter of credit workflows will be integrated with XDC’s blockchain network to streamline trade documentation and settlement.

Together, they form the first end-to-end digital trade finance network linking:

Documentation → Validation → Settlement all under a single infrastructure.

XDC Ventures (XVC.TECH) is launching a Stable-Coin Lab to work with financial institutions on regulated stablecoin pilots for trade to deepen institutional trade-finance integration through launch of pilots with banks and corporates for regulated stable-coin issuance and settlement.

The Bottom Line

Payments alone won’t transform Global Trade Finance — Trade finance + Tokenized Settlement will.

This is the shift happening underway XDC Network's acquisition of Contour is the quiet catalyst.

Learn how trade finance is being revolutionised:

https://www.reuters.com/press-releases/xdc-ventures-acquires-contour-network-launches-stablecoin-lab-trade-finance-2025-10-22/

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Inside The Deal That Made Polymarket’s Founder One Of The Youngest Billionaires On Earth🌍

One year ago, the FBI raided Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan’s apartment. Now, the college dropout is a billionaire at age 27.

In July, Jeffrey Sprecher, the 70-year-old billionaire CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, sat at Manhatta, an upscale restaurant in the financial district overlooking the sprawling New York City skyline from the 60th floor. As a sommelier weaved through tables pouring wine, in walked Shayne Coplan—in a T-shirt and jeans, clutching a plastic water bottle and a paper bag with a bagel he’d picked up en route. Sprecher chuckles as he recalls his first impression of the boyish, eccentric entrepreneur: “An old bald guy that works at the New York Stock Exchange, where we require that you wear a suit and tie, next to a mop-headed guy in a T-shirt that's 27.” But Sprecher was fascinated by Polymarket, Coplan’s blockchain-based prediction market, and after dinner, he made his move: “I asked Shayne if he would consider selling us his company.”

Prediction markets like Polymarket let thousands of ordinary people bet on future events—the unemployment rate, say, or when BitCoin will hit an all-time high. In aggregate, prediction market bets have proven to be something of a crystal ball with the wisdom of the crowd often proving itself more prescient than expert opinion. For instance, Polymarket punters predicted that Trump would prevail in the 2024 presidential election, when many national pundits were sure that Kamala Harris would win.

Coplan initially turned down Sprecher’s buyout offer. But discussions led to negotiations and eventually a deal. In October, Intercontinental announced it had invested $2 billion for an up to 25% stake in the company, bringing the young solo founder the balance he was looking for. “We're consumer, we’re viral, we're culture. They’re finance, they’re headless and they’re infrastructure,” Coplan tells Forbes in a recent interview.

At the same time, Coplan announced investments from other billionaires including Figma’s Dylan Field, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Uber’s Travis Kalanick and hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin. A longtime Red Hot Chili Peppers fan, Coplan even convinced lead singer Anthony Kiedis to invest after a mutual acquaintance brought the musician to Coplan’s apartment one day. “He's buzzing my door, and I’m like, ‘holy shit,'” Coplan recalls, his bright blue eyes widening. “I love their music. A lot of the inspiration [for my work] comes from the music that I listen to.”

Thanks to the deals, Polymarket’s valuation quickly shot to $9 billion, making the 2025 Under 30 alum the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, with an estimated 11% stake worth $1 billion. His reign was short: twenty days later, he was overtaken as the youngest by the three 22-year-old founders of AI startup Mercor.

Young entrepreneurs are minting ten-figure fortunes faster than ever. In addition to the Mercor trio and Coplan, 15 other Under 30 alumni—including ScaleAI cofounder Lucy Guo, Reddit’s Steve Huffman and Cursor’s cofounders—became billionaires this year, while Guo’s cofounder Alexandr Wang and Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev (both former Under 30 honorees) regained their billionaire status after having fallen out of the ranks.

The budding billionaire has long been fascinated by markets and tech. When he was just 14, Coplan emailed the regional Securities and Exchange Commission office to ask how to create new marketplaces. “I did not get a response, but it’s a really funny email,” he says, grinning playfully as he thinks of his younger self. “It just shows that this stuff takes over a decade of percolating in your mind.”

Two years later, Coplan showed up at the offices of internet startup Genius uninvited after multiple emails of his asking for an internship went ignored. At age 16—at least a decade younger than anyone in that office—he secured his first job after making a memorable impression with his “wild curls” and “encyclopedic knowledge of billionaire tech entrepreneurs.” “If he chooses to become a tech entrepreneur, which seems likely, I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing his name again in the press before long,” Chris Glazek, his manager at the time, wrote in Coplan’s college recommendation letter.

Coplan went on to study computer science at NYU, but dropped out in 2017 to work on various crypto projects that never took off. In 2020, he founded Polymarket to create a solution to the “rampant misinformation” he saw in the world: The company’s first market allowed users to bet on when New York City would reopen amid the pandemic. He soon expanded into elections and pop culture happenings, among other events.

But it didn’t take long for the company to butt heads with regulators. In January 2022, Polymarket paid a $1.4 million fine to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for offering unregistered markets. It was also ordered to block all U.S. users, but activity on Polymarket skyrocketed particularly during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, with bets totaling $3.6 billion. A week after the election, the FBI raided Coplan's apartment and seized his devices as part of an investigation into a possible violation of this agreement. Shortly after, Coplan posted on his X account that he saw the raid as “a last-ditch effort” from the Biden administration “to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents.”

In July, the Department of Justice and CFTC dropped the investigations—after which Sprecher reached out to Coplan for dinner—and less than a week later, Polymarket announced it had acquired CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange QCX to prepare for a compliant U.S. launch. QCX applied to be a federally-registered exchange in 2022—an application that was left dormant for three years before receiving approval less than two weeks before the acquisition was announced. When asked about the timing of the deal, Coplan points to CFTC acting chairwoman Caroline Pham, who President Trump tapped to lead the agency in January. “Caroline deserves a lot of credit for getting every single license that had been paused for no reason approved, as acting chairwoman in less than a year,” he says. Coplan had realized an acquisition might be the only way for Polymarket to legally operate in the U.S. as early as 2021 due to the lengthy federal approval process, a source familiar with the deal told Forbes.

Just two months after the acquisition and days after Donald Trump Jr. joined Polymarket’s advisory board, the company received federal approval to launch in the U.S. (Trump Jr. has also served as a strategic advisor to Polymarket’s main competitor Kalshi since January.)

Polymarket’s rapid rise has drawn critics. Dennis Kelleher, co-founder and CEO of Washington-based financial advocacy group Better Markets, told Forbes in an email that the current administration’s deregulation around prediction markets has unlocked a regulatory “loophole” to enable “unregulated gambling” under the CFTC, “which has zero expertise, capacity or resources to regulate and police these markets.” Kelleher added that with backing from the Trump family “who are directly trying to profit on this new gambling den… the massive deregulation and crypto hysteria will almost certainly end badly for the American people.”

Investors and businesses are scrambling to seize the moment of deregulation. “We had opportunities to invest in events markets earlier, but there was a lot of risk,” Sprecher says, listing the regulatory changes in favor of crypto and prediction markets under the current administration. “This was the moment to invest if we wanted to still be early in the space.”

In the last few months, Trump’s Truth Social and sportsbook FanDuel, as well as cryptocurrency exchanges Crypto.com, Coinbase and Gemini all announced their own plans to offer prediction markets. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said prediction markets, which were integrated into its platform in March, were helping drive record activity for the retail brokerage in its third quarter earnings call.

“People are starting to realize right now that the opportunities are endless,” says Dubin, the billionaire hedge fund veteran who invested in Polymarket earlier this year. He points to sports betting companies, which have been regulated by states as gambling activity and taxed accordingly. States like New York can tax up to 51% of sportsbooks’ revenue, but federally-regulated prediction markets can bypass state laws, avoiding taxes and operating in all 50 states. With the realization that prediction markets could upend the sports betting industry—which brought in $13.7 billion in revenue in 2024—businesses are quickly jumping on board despite pushback from state gambling regulators. In October, both Polymarket and Kalshi secured partnerships with sportsbook PrizePicks and the National Hockey League, and Polymarket announced exclusive partnerships with sportsbook DraftKings and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

The disruption won’t be limited to sports betting. Alongside its investment, Intercontinental’s tens of thousands of institutional clients including large hedge funds and over 750 third-party providers of data will soon have access to Polymarket data, as it gets integrated into Intercontinental’s products such as indices to better inform investment decisions. It also hopes to work with Polymarket to work on initiatives around tokenization—or converting financial assets into digital tokens on blockchain technology—to allow traders on Intercontinental’s exchanges to trade more flexibly at all hours of the day, Sprecher says. What’s more, in November, Google Finance announced it would integrate Polymarket and Kalshi data into its search results, while Yahoo Finance also announced an exclusive partnership with Polymarket.

Despite flashy investors, partnerships and a record $2.4 billion of trading volume in November, Polymarket has yet to launch in the U.S. or turn a profit. Coplan and his investors have hinted at ways the company could make money one day—selling its data, charging fees to users, launching a cryptocurrency token (similar to Ethereum or Bitcoin)—but decline to confirm any specifics. For now, the only thing that’s certain is the bet Coplan is making on himself. “Going for it and having it not pan out is an infinitely better outcome than living your life as a what if,” he says.

Standing across from the New York Stock Exchange building, Coplan tilts his head up as he watches a massive banner with Polymarket’s logo get hoisted onto the exterior of the building. It’s been five years since founding. One year since the FBI raid. He’s taking it all in. “Against all odds,” the bright blue banner reads, rippling in the wind alongside three American flags protruding from the building.

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Epstein-Linked Emails Expose Funding Ties to Bitcoin Core Development — Here Is What the Documents Reveal
  • Newly released emails show Jeffrey Epstein helped fund MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, which supported Bitcoin Core development.
  • The documents also confirm that Leon Black donated to MIT’s Media Lab through Epstein-directed channels.
  • The revelations reshape part of Bitcoin’s early institutional funding history and highlight long-hidden influence from controversial donors.

Newly unsealed emails from the House Oversight Committee have shed fresh light on Jeffrey Epstein’s hidden financial influence inside MIT’s Media Lab — and more importantly, how some of that money flowed into Bitcoin Core development. The correspondence reveals that Joichi Ito, then-director of the MIT Media Lab, relied on Epstein-connected “gift funds” to rapidly launch the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) in 2015, the research hub that became one of the primary sources of funding for Bitcoin’s core developers.

Emails Show Epstein-Connected Money Helped Launch MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative

In the newly surfaced emails, Ito directly thanked Epstein for the financial help that allowed MIT to “move quickly and win this round,” referring to the formation of DCI — a program explicitly designed to provide long-term support for Bitcoin Core contributors after the collapse of the Bitcoin Foundation. Ito’s forwarded message to Epstein described how the foundation’s implosion left core developers without stable funding, creating an opening for MIT to bring them under its umbrella.

He explained that three major developers — including Wladimir van der Laan and Cory Fields — agreed to join MIT, calling it “a big win for us.” The email also highlighted early support from prominent academics, including cryptographer Ron Rivest and IMF economist Simon Johnson. Epstein simply replied: “gavin is clever.”

Funding Numbers Reveal a Much Larger Financial Trail

MIT publicly claimed that Epstein donated $850,000 to the institution, with $525,000 flowing to the Media Lab. But journalist Ronan Farrow later reported the true figure was closer to $7.5 million — including a $5 million anonymous donation connected to Epstein associate Leon Black. The new emails appear to confirm that Black not only donated, but did so through Epstein’s direction.

One email from Ito to Epstein reads: “We were able to keep the Leon Black money, but the $25K from your foundation is getting bounced by MIT back to ASU.”

 

Epstein responded: “No problem — trying to get more black for you.”

The documents reveal Epstein’s influence reached deeper into Bitcoin circles than previously acknowledged, even including early conversations with Brock Pierce — another figure with documented ties to both Epstein and controversy surrounding early crypto foundations.

MIT’s Internal Concerns and the Fallout

The emails also expose MIT’s internal unease around anonymous or reputationally risky donations. After the scandal broke, Ito resigned in 2019. MIT later tightened donation policies, warning that “everything becomes public” eventually — a statement that now seems prophetic given this week’s disclosures.

Developers like Wladimir van der Laan say they were unaware of the extent of Epstein’s involvement and noted that DCI’s funding transparency “was not great back in the day.” The Media Lab and DCI declined to comment.

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