Polymarket — the fast-growing prediction-markets app that has allowed users to wager on everything from sports to the weather to the Iran war — is scrambling to get to the bottom of what it believes could be a case of corporate espionage by its archrival Kalshi, The Post has learned.
The New York-based betting platform — headed by 27-year-old, shaggy-haired CEO Shayne Coplan — has amassed a working dossier that it has dubbed “copycat” that has detailed roughly a dozen of eyebrow-raising incidents and data points — including examples where Kalshi apparently launched products that were strikingly similar to Polymarket’s and with suspicious timing, the sources said.
“There have been a couple too many coincidences,” Polymarket’s head of marketing, Matthew Modabber, told The Post, confirming the probe in a brief phone interview.
“There is bad intention in how they copy us. They’re breathing down our neck.”
The executive declined to elaborate, but sources close to the situation said one possibility being considered is that there is one or more moles in Polymarket’s offices. And in one instance, according to an insider, an even more bizarre circumstance is getting scrutiny.
Specifically, some Polymarket employees raised concerns in recent months that Paradigm, a venture-capital firm that backs Kalshi, could be spying on its offices in lower Manhattan. That’s because Paradigm rents out offices in the trendy Soho neighborhood that are located directly across the street from Polymarket’s.
In addition to views of fashion outlets and the swanky Balthazar cafe on the street below, Paradigm’s offices command a view of some parts of Polymarket’s offices — and potentially its workers’ computer screens, the sources said.
Accordingly, Polymarket’s Soho office this spring had some of its windows tinted, according to the sources.
“We got together and discussed, like, ‘Is this possible?’” said one Polymarket insider, referring to concerns that the company’s office was getting spied on. The group concluded that, “With Kalshi, it is,” the source said.
In response to questions about alleged spying, a Paradigm spokesperson said: “This is laughable.”
Kalshi spokesperson Jack Such said: “This is sad and borderline delusional. Polymarket is welcome to waste its time investigating. While they do that, we’ll keep building.”
Now, Polymarket’s investigation is focusing on how Kalshi not only learned about the timing of Polymarket product launches and marketing campaigns but also how it got hold of enough details to effectively copy them, according to insiders.
Suspicions inside Polymarket have mounted over the last year, but the final straw came in February. A Polymarket team had settled on a Feb. 12 launch for a “pop up” grocery store in lower Manhattan called Polymarket to offer free groceries for the first 300 people waiting in line.
The team, which began working on the grocery store in November, inked a $643,380 lease in January that included branding and production for the five-day event.
But about nine days before Polymarket was set to go live, Kalshi launched a free-grocery publicity stunt in New York, setting up shop inside a Westside Market location in the East Village. Kalshi handed out $50 vouchers for groceries as it touted “free markets” and floated possible wagers like, “Will the price of eggs go up this month?”
“Their intent was to just dilute our event,” a Polymarket source said. “I was like, ‘Damn, that’s uncool.’ The event was very meaningful to Shayne, having grown up in New York, and so we were disappointed.”
Kalshi’s head of communications, Elisabeth Diana, insisted Kalshi didn’t copy Polymarket’s grocery event, didn’t have insider information about Polymarket’s timing and that theirs had been in the works long beforehand.
Kalshi spokesperson Such added that both companies were “clearly inspired” by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaigning on subsidized grocery stores.
Elsewhere, Polymarket insiders said the company, since January, had been developing a tool that would allow users to trade perpetual futures contracts, or “perps,” that allow users to speculate on the real-time price fluctuations of various assets, including stocks without owning them. An internal team set the announcement date for April 21, according to a source.
But about an hour before Polymarket’s announcement was slated to go live, the tech news site The Information published an article citing anonymous sources revealing that Kalshi was planning to host its own perps trading product.
Polymarket executives were livid, according to sources.
“They seemed to know we were going to announce that day,” said one insider, referencing Kalshi. “To us, the timing was pretty suspicious.”
Such said Kalshi had been working on its launch since 2024. He said he believes The Information caught wind of Kalshi’s plans from a social media teaser it posted on X on April 13. That post shows a video of what appears to be an infinite Slinky with the caption “Timeless,” a finance reference to perpetual futures contracts which never expire.
Polymarket’s “copycat” dossier on Kalshi features roughly a dozen side-by-side screenshots of announcements, social media posts and app designs by the two rivals. One Polymarket executive said the dossier is a working catalog and contains “only one tenth” of instances of Kalshi apparently copying or front-running them.
One slide of Polymarket’s dossier displays a screengrab of a June 10, 2025, post on X where Polymarket announced a new product that allows users to bet whether crypto prices will go up or down each hour. The actual post on X was timestamped at 9:01 a.m. and racked up nearly 24 million views.
The copycat slide then shows a screenshot of a post announcing a similar product by trading platform Webull, which said it was releasing the tool in partnership with Kalshi. Kalshi and Webull’s launch was time-stamped in a press release reviewed by The Post on June 10, 9 a.m.
“SAME DAY?” Polymarket’s document reads.
Such refuted Polymarket’s claims: “In fact, Kalshi has offered these products since well before June 10, 2025. That was just the day that Webull started to offer them. The fact that Polymarket announced this product long after we had actually launched should make it obvious who is copying whom.”
Some copycat items appeared to document cases of mimicking Polymarket. One slide displays a screengrab of a Polymarket mobile ad on Meta for football betting that targeted California users last summer, displaying “Hey California” in large font at the top. Polymarket began running the ads on Friday Aug. 22, according to the slide. By Monday, Kalshi had begun running nearly identical ads with the same “Hey California” banner, per the slide.
Such said that Polymarket has no copyright or trademark over the “extremely common” phrase “Hey California,” adding: “Attributing this coincidence to corporate espionage is delusional.”
The pair’s long-running feud has escalated this year as both have faced pressure from lawmakers and regulators who are aiming to rein in prediction markets, which have been criticized for facilitating insider trading and betting on war.
It also comes as Silicon Valley investors have plowed ever-bigger sums of cash into both companies. Polymarket has raised roughly $2 billion since it was founded in 2020 and has been aiming for a roughly $15 billion valuation in recent deal talks, according to analytics firm PitchBook. Kalshi, launched in 2018, has raised roughly $2.6 billion and was valued most recently at $22 billion, double what investors thought the company was worth in December.
Kalshi, led by CEO Tarek Mansour, operates under US Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulations while Polymarket operates a significant portion of its business offshore. Polymarket has a limited US product that is subject to CFTC regulations.
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