Polymarket’s secretive links to Israel exposed

Journalist Whitney Webb has published a detailed report looking at the secretive history of Polymarket. It’s a history which includes links to US and Israeli intelligence services:

We've been quiet recently because Mark Goodwin and I have been working to write the most comprehensive investigation into Polymarket's origins and ambitions to date.

We found that Polymarket's "official" origin story, that Shayne Coplan founded the company alone in 2020 and then…

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) July 1, 2026

What is Polymarket?

If you’re unfamiliar with Polymarket, it’s an online ‘prediction market’. Yahoo Finance describes prediction markets as:

exchanges where people can bet on event outcomes. The bets are usually made by purchasing binary contracts that pay out if the event unfolds the way you expect. In this context, binary means there are only two outcomes — often yes or no — and your contract bets on one of them.

Here’s how the founder of prediction market Kalshi described the tech:

The co-founder of Kalshi says: " The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion." pic.twitter.com/M1gf0leJFV

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) December 3, 2025

In a sense, they’re a form of online gambling. What differentiates prediction markets from the online bookies is the extent to which insider trading is not just rife but expected:

Some war related insider trading? A brand new account in polymarket, only invested in US going to war with Venezuela and Maduro out by January 31. Up 13k so far, was spending thousands on Maduro out at bargain prices as recently as 4 hours ago. Now it’s at .50. pic.twitter.com/GLnfvAfEZc

— tyson brody (@tysonbrody) January 3, 2026

Donald Trump Jr is a paid strategic advisor for Kalshi — where they are setting odds so people can bet on the decisions made by his father.

Just an all-time grift. https://t.co/X3r7SonDxZ pic.twitter.com/VcqBJsGIK2

— Melanie D'Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) December 22, 2025

As Webb reported:

During the past couple of years, Polymarket and Kalshi have become important components of reporting on global finance and politics. This is partially due to their extensive cultivation of wide-ranging media partnerships. For instance, in the case of Polymarket, the company now boast partnerships with the Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones, as well as Yahoo! Finance, Substack and the live-streaming platform Parti. While these partnerships have been framed as an effort to further legitimize prediction markets, concerns have been raised that these media partnerships could be used to intentionally manipulate these very markets via the implantation of false and misleading stories.

It was already hard to trust the establishment given the revolving door between the media, politics, and big business; prediction markets add a whole new layer of mistrust:

The BBC has uncovered a pattern of market spikes before Donald Trump's public announcements about Iran. Hundreds of millions of dollars in oil futures were traded 14 to 16 minutes before Trump's Truth Social posts. Those traders made a fortune.

Donald Trump Jr. is an investor… pic.twitter.com/PaVDtrm5fr

— Ounka (@OunkaOnX) April 21, 2026

Polymarket didn’t spring out of the ether…

The founder of Polymarket is one Shayne Coplan. His creation made him the world’s youngest ‘self-made’ billionaire and also put him in a position of incredible influence.

As Webb reported, Coplan and Polymarket didn’t just spring out of the ether. In fact, Polymarket actually had a precursor company called TokenUnion:

Oddly, any discussion of TokenUnion is absent from essentially every media profile of Coplan that has been written since Polymarket achieved breakout success a few years ago. All of those media profiles paint Coplan’s success as derivative of pure luck and assure the reader that Polymarket began in 2020 with no real predecessor.

Coplan’s path to success saw him emulating figures like Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Peter Thiel (Palantir). If you follow such individuals, you have an idea of what this means. According to Webb:

This narrative bears many similarities to the stories that have been woven regarding the origins of major Big Tech firms, whose founders Coplan explicitly hoped to emulate. In many of those cases, these founders are said to have built their companies “in their garage” or something similarly humble, only for it to trickle out years later that their companies’ success stories were only made possible by funding provided by U.S. intelligence or similarly shady organization and groups.

Providing more detail on Palantir, Webb wrote:

The CIA would continue to be intimately involved with Palantir well past this point. In fact, they became connected to such an extent that it is perfectly reasonable to argue that they are, for all intents and purposes, a CIA front company. For instance, following the In-Q-Tel investment in Palantir shortly after it was incorporated in 2003, the CIA was Palantir’s sole client until 2008 and, as Alex Karp had stated, CIA analysts were always the company’s “intended clients.”

The Israel connection

Speaking on Polymarket’s ties to Israeli intelligence, Webb wrote:

In the case of Coplan, despite efforts made to obfuscate his past, he was clearly immersed in networks within the cryptocurrency agency with ties to Israel and Israeli intelligence well before he founded Polymarket.

Lou Kerner was a key advisor to TokenUnion, with Webb writing:

Kerner, who boasts close ties to AIPAC, previously led the Israel Founders Syndicate and is a current advisor of the Israeli Blockchain Association. Kerner is also partnered in an Israeli tech incubator alongside Glilot Capital. Glilot Capital was created by two Israeli military intelligence veterans who invest specifically in “entrepreneurs who emerge from the elite Unit 8200” signals intelligence unit, often likened to Israel’s equivalent of the NSA.

TokenUnion was originally called TokenBnk, with Webb additionally noting:

Polymarket really started years earlier as another company called TokenBnk that was deeply tied to Israeli interests, specifically a crypto company founded by Benjamin Netanyahu’s niece and nephew. Coplan has actively tried to obfuscate this company from his story and it’s not the only thing either.

Dystopian

Polymarket is yet another Yank tech company with links to the US and Israeli intelligence services. It may also be the most dystopian tech evolution we’ve seen in our lifetime. People are literally betting on the outcome of international conflicts, and the people instigating said conflicts are profiting.

Unlike with social media or messenger apps, we don’t need a homegrown version of Polymarket; we need to ban this technology outright.

Shut it down now.

Featured image via the Canary