A screenshot of an email sent by the prediction market company and circulated on social media last week said some contractors were being let go in a “company-wide reduction in force” this month, according to the report. Polymarket told Bloomberg the email was legitimate.
Polymarket recently hired several senior positions following investor pressure to bring more discipline to the company, the report said.
“As we’ve grown and brought on new leadership, we’ve reorganized to set the company up for its next phase of growth, which has meant a lot of new hires, changes in personnel and letting some people go,” Polymarket said in a statement, per the report, while declining to share specific figures on staff reductions.
Polymarket hired ex-Amazon finance chief Warren Jenson to serve as its first chief financial officer in September, the report said. The company has also hired executives from Goldman Sachs, DoorDash and Robinhood.
Once the largest prediction market exchange, Polymarket has lost that position to Kalshi and faced legal issues even as the industry has blossomed, according to the report.
The legal issues, however, are not confined to one company. For example, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin sued Kalshi last week, accusing the prediction market of providing illegal gambling to Arkansas residents, including those not yet old enough to open electronic wagering accounts under state regulations, PYMNTS reported Friday (Nov. 6).
The lawsuit came as federal appeals courts have left states like Connecticut, Nevada and New York free to enforce their gambling laws against sports event contracts, the latest in a series of setbacks for Kalshi and the federal regulator backing its position.
Kalshi called the Arkansas suit baseless and argued Congress established a single federal regulator so exchanges could do business under nationwide rules.
That regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has said the Commodity Exchange Act grants it exclusive authority over swaps traded on federally registered exchanges, while the question of who gets to regulate the predictions industry continues to play out in various federal courts.
“The dispute turns on whether contracts that pay out based on a game’s outcome fall within the federal definition of a swap and whether the statute displaces state gambling laws as applied to those contracts,” PYMNTS reported.
