Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan said traders hunting the next 100x token are playing a game of “irrational exuberance and hot potato.” He made the remarks on Wednesday, October 7, at the ongoing TOKEN2049 Singapore event, one of the crypto industry’s largest annual conferences, aiming his warning at the retail speculators that his prediction market platform is trying to win over with steadier odds.

A bet on unloading something worthless

Coplan described the pursuit of early, explosive token gains as a wager that something worthless can be offloaded before it collapses. “People think they’re buying something, it’s worthless, but they’re buying it. If it can go to 100X, they want to sell it before it goes back to zero,” he said.

While he acknowledged that a few traders do get rich this way, he framed the strategy as one in which prices that climb are bound to fall.

The chief executive reached for an old reference point. His “irrational exuberance” phrasing echoes the 2000 book of the same name by Nobel laureate economist Robert J. Shiller, which studied how market optimism feeds on psychology and social dynamics — a title Shiller borrowed from then-Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan’s 1996 remarks about stretched asset valuations. Coplan’s argument is that crypto’s lure of fast money collides with the fact that picking the winning altcoin is rare.

In December, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes made a related point, stating at the time that altcoin season never actually ended, though most traders missed the cycle’s biggest gainers.

The pitch for prediction markets over moonshots

Coplan’s comments double as a sales pitch for his own platform, positioning prediction markets as a rival destination for the same speculative capital that chases small-cap tokens. According to him, the draw of prediction markets is the absence of a lottery ticket. “On Polymarket, if you’re trading these markets, there’s no exponential upside,” he said. Informed traders keep placing bets, he added, because the odds on future events are more predictable than a memecoin’s chart. Positions on such platforms resolve according to the outcomes of real-world events — sports results among them — so payouts depend on how an event ends rather than on a token’s next move.

Polymarket is the second-largest prediction market platform, trailing Kalshi. The platform recorded DEX volume of over $1.22 billion over the past seven days, per DefiLlama data. Kalshi logged $2.3 billion over the same period.

A December report from 10x Research stated that prediction markets are becoming crypto’s new battleground. The research showed that these markets enable data-driven “elite” traders to feed on the information asymmetry left behind by casual bettors chasing a quick win.

Manipulation findings and regulatory pressure

Researchers at Stanford University and Singapore Management University discovered that Polymarket’s five-minute Bitcoin contracts created incentives to manipulate spot prices right before settlement.

Pressure to further regulate the space is also building. While the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFT) holds oversight at the federal level, prediction market platforms have run into trouble at the state level. In September, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Polymarket US, alleging it operates an unlicensed gambling business, and asked a state court to shut it down.

The lawsuit joins the federal-versus-state jurisdiction fight that the CFTC opened against New York and several other states, including Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois. In July, the attorneys general of 44 states wrote a letter to the CFTC challenging its authority to regulate sports-related event contracts. Some of those states have already taken action against Polymarket, Kalshi, or both over sports contracts. At stake in the standoff is which level of government sets the rules for event contracts in the US.