The intimate meal, 60 floors above New York’s financial district, brought together a pillar of the Wall Street establishment and a young crypto upstart.
The host, billionaire septuagenarian Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, arrived in a suit. His guest, 27-year-old Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan, walked in wearing a T-shirt, carrying a disposable water bottle and a paper bag from a bakery.
Over dinner at Manhatta, a high-end Danny Meyer restaurant, Sprecher admitted he’d never used Coplan’s crypto-powered prediction market — it was still closed to US customers at the time. But Coplan’s pitch stuck: a new kind of exchange that makes it possible to bet on politics, sports, culture and just about anything else.
