Polymarket Hires Coinbase’s Failed Social-Coin Architect

Polymarket has hired Jacob Horne, the co-founder of Zora, the app behind Coinbase’s failed creator-coin experiment, to rebuild its onchain trading product. Chief executive Shayne Coplan announced the move Thursday.

Horne left Zora eight days ago after more than six years running it. His new job sets him against Kalshi, the exchange that now powers Coinbase’s own prediction markets across the United States.

What Coplan Asked Horne to Fix

Polymarket runs two venues:

• Traders outside the US use a market that settles on the Polygon blockchain, a corner of the industry known as Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
• Americans use a separate exchange licensed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Coplan said Horne will work with him directly on product, and pointed at the crypto side of that split.

“He will be working closely with me on product, in particular making Polymarket DeFi great again,” the Polymarket executive shared.

Coplan added that the onchain product had weakened as the company grew, and that longtime users believed it was abandoned. He promised a town hall to set out a fix.

Horne Comes From a Product Coinbase Shut Down

Zora let people turn social posts into tokens others could trade on Base, the blockchain network Coinbase built. Coinbase pushed the idea for over a year before Pollak admitted the bet failed.

Brian Armstrong said the coins did not work. Zora was one of several Base experiments dropped this year, and Coinbase restored the Coinbase Wallet name this month.

Coinbase did not abandon prediction markets. It routed its US product through Kalshi instead. Kalshi handled $13.1 billion of the $15.8 billion traded across both platforms in the week to September 13, leaving Polymarket with 17%.

Three Senior Hires in Eight Days

Horne is the third. Warren Jenson became Polymarket’s first chief financial officer on September 10.

Collin McKinney Hill, a former DoorDash general manager, joined as vice president of operations on September 15.

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