There is no shortage crazy details about Polymarket. The government alleges that both the Special Forces soldier and the longtime Google employee used the prediction market to amass compact fortunes through insider trading; CEO Shayne Coplan had his own apartment attacked by FBI agents who entered through a battering ram; and one of its directors apparently paid influencers through your personal PayPal account to advertise your business.
But one of the biggest oddities about Polymarket has been somewhat overlooked: what’s going on with the Panama-based company she founded to comply with a settlement with the federal government? And why, as the WIRED report suggests, do some of the Panamanian company’s employees appear to have worked in Fresh York?
Prediction Market Related to Donald Trump Jr. has an extremely convoluted structure. In 2022, federal regulators found it was operating as an unlicensed derivatives exchange, banned it from the country and banned it from serving U.S. clients. Before the ban was introduced, Adventure One QSS was established in Panama, as first reported by Sportico. The Adventure One QSS was at sea so it could hold up over operational responsibilities for the flagship Polymarket platform. Another US-based company, Polymarket US, was founded in 2025 and is overseen by an entity called QCX LLC. To this day, Polymarket US is the only Polymarket platform that can legally serve US customers.
Despite this structure, WIRED found that Adventure One QSS staff work outside the US. Former Polymarket employees told WIRED that some Adventure One QSS employees lived in Fresh York, including some who worked at the company’s Manhattan headquarters.
These employees did not travel to Panama, report to anyone in Panama, or contact their colleagues in Panama because, they say, there were no colleagues there. Instead, they say, Adventure One QSS staff were scattered across many other countries, including the US.
The fine points of this structure are crucial. The 2022 settlement fined Blockratize, a corporate entity affiliated with Polymarket, of $1.4 million and ordered it to “liquidate” offering marketplaces that violated the Commodity Exchange Act. The agreement also required the company to stop violating CEA and other Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulations. Former CFTC employees consider the location of Adventure One staff to be crucial to the deal. “We would really like to know that the people supposedly in Panama were not actually in Panama,” one former CFTC lawyer tells WIRED.
As Sportico reported, Adventure One QSS did it initially a name Panamanian residents in the company’s 2021 incorporation documents include Mario Ernesto García de Paredes, a lawyer called the company’s “resident agent.” A woman named Diana Munoz was replaced as president of the company for two months before being replaced by Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, who lives in Fresh York. Another man believed to live in Panama, Omar Camargo, was named as secretary. García de Paredes did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment, and Munoz and Camargo could not be reached for clarification on their roles. It appears that Munoz and Camargo have worked together before; They are listed as directors in securities filings related to a company called the Internet Art Foundation.
WIRED’s reporting overlaps with earlier NPR reporting, which found that the company’s headquarters in a Panama skyscraper was vacant and that the company had no staff in Panama. In contrast, Adventure One QSS employees in the United States were allegedly productive and present. One former Polymarket employee said that all employees in Fresh York who “touched code,” contracted events or otherwise dealt with the offshore platform technically all worked for Adventure One QSS, “but there was no barrier” separating the corporate arms in practice.