Executives from Amazon, Uber, and the New York Stock Exchange are all here.

Written by: Liu Kaiwen, Rhythm

On September 20, a screenshot about "Binance Wallet soon launching Polymarket Pre-IPO" circulated on X.

Polymarket was founded in 2020 by Shayne Coplan, who serves as CEO, allowing users to trade the potential outcomes of political, sports, and global events with funds. In early September, media reports indicated that 1789 Capital is leading a round of financing of about $1 billion, with a post-investment valuation reaching $21 billion.

Looking back with the logic of "going public", the series of actions by Polymarket in the past few months suddenly makes sense: a group of executives from Amazon, Uber, the New York Stock Exchange, Coinbase, and Robinhood joined in quick succession; power in the U.S. operations was reallocated; the on-chain order book was prepared for a complete overhaul; the company also began filling positions for CFO, compliance, risk control, and government relations.

It seems that the platform is gearing itself up with a framework that resembles more of a financial company.

Big company executives parachute in to pave the way for the IPO

On September 10, Warren Jenson joined Polymarket as the first company-level CFO. He previously held financial leadership positions at several giants including Amazon, responsible for financial, capital strategy, and long-term planning at large companies.

A few days later, Collin McKinney Hill, former General Manager of DoorDash and Chief of Staff to the founder of Bridgewater, was appointed Vice President of Operations.

Other core team members include Travis VanderZanden from Uber overseeing growth; former Coinbase executive Dan Lee managing U.S. operations; Megan McGrath, a former Robinhood executive, appointed Chief Compliance Officer; and Hayk Mkrtchyan, who previously managed the core matching system at the New York Stock Exchange, became the head of Polymarket's U.S. exchange engineering.

These individuals come from different companies, yet each corresponds to several gaps that are most easily exposed in a large financial platform: finance, operations, growth, U.S. business, compliance, product, and trading infrastructure is almost completely being revamped.

According to The Information, Dan Lee, who was brought in from Coinbase, has gradually taken over Polymarket's U.S. operations on an actual work level. Sources close to the company disclose that employees report their work to Lee, rather than to the nominal U.S. business CEO Justin Hertzberg.

More direct changes are occurring within the engineering team. Josh Stevens, who joined in March as Vice President of DeFi Engineering and previously served as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Aave, publicly stated that the early rapidly assembled code can no longer be saved in the long term, and the team is preparing to rewrite the matching engine.

His reasoning is also straightforward: the platform has now become an exchange that handles user funds, rather than just a small product that can experiment without consequence.

If these actions are viewed through the lens of the IPO logic, it appears as though there is an urgent effort to bolster the organizational capabilities of a financial platform.

With a $21 billion valuation, who holds shares in this platform?

Currently, the market valuation anchor for Polymarket is roughly distributed between $15 billion and $21 billion. The only investor with reliable, public data is the Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE.

As of June 30, 2026, ICE holds approximately 22% of the platform's issued shares and has exclusive rights to nominate and vote for one board member. If simply calculated, ICE's 22% stake corresponds to about $4.6 billion; if calculated at a fully diluted 14%, it amounts to about $2.9 billion.

Unlike ICE, other financing parties can only make rough estimates based on the invested amounts and the then post-investment valuations: Blockchain Capital holds about $2.3 billion (11%), 1789 Capital holds about $300 million (1.4%), and CEO Coplan holds about $2.3 billion (11%).

It's worth mentioning that Trump Jr., the eldest son of Trump, serves as a partner at 1789 Capital and has been a member of Polymarket's advisory board since August 2025.

Equity transfer packaged as an IPO

In the screenshot from September 20, what may be worth paying attention to is not only Polymarket but also Paimon Finance. The screenshot links "Polymarket is about to IPO" with $pPOLY, where the full name of $pPOLY is Paimon Polymarket SPV Token.

Paimon is a platform that performs private equity and Pre-IPO asset tokenization. Its model is to package assets related to unlisted companies into on-chain tokens. The company has previously included assets from private firms such as SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic into the same product framework.

The Binance mentioned in the screenshot has also made it very clear about the nature of such products: Pre-Access assets are provided by third parties, and the Binance wallet is merely an access point; these assets do not represent direct shares of the underlying companies nor guarantee that the related companies will definitely complete an IPO in the future.

Therefore, a more accurate description would not be "Polymarket is issuing its own Pre-IPO stock," but rather "Paimon may be packaging private equity related to Polymarket into a token that can circulate on-chain."

For Polymarket, the real IPO may not have begun yet; however, the trading around the IPO expectations has already emerged in advance.