“…Part I of a two-part series exposing the truth behind the world’s most popular prediction market and its dark ambitions to alter both markets and representative government forever
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During the past couple of years, Polymarket and Kalshi have become important components of reporting on global finance and politics. This is partially due to their extensive cultivation of wide-ranging media partnerships. For instance, in the case of Polymarket, the company now boast partnerships with the Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones, as well as Yahoo! Finance, Substack and the live-streaming platform Parti. While these partnerships have been framed as an effort to further legitimize prediction markets, concerns have been raised that these media partnerships could be used to intentionally manipulate these very markets via the implantation of false and misleading stories.
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By following in the footsteps of his admitted idol, Zuckerberg, and backed by funding from Thiel-linked sources, Coplan has managed to resurrect the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), one of the most controversial Pentagon programs from its now defunct Information Awareness Office (IAO). Tellingly, his efforts to launch Polymarket included direct communication with one of the main architects of the PAM program and he was also greatly influenced by another apparent Thiel-linked effort to resurrect PAM that failed.
Importantly, Coplan’s apparent re-brand of PAM –– often referred to in the past as the “Terrorism Futures Market” ––is about more than just reaping mega-profits in an era where insider trading and financial corruption are flourishing with the White House’s blessing. As will be explored in Part II of this series, an ulterior motive directly linked to Coplan’s efforts aims to advance an extremely dystopian governance model that is of great interest to the Big Tech billionaires now closely linked to Coplan and the dominant prediction market companies, such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
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DARPA was also interested in prediction markets for other reasons, as some of the agency’s managers also “believed a prediction market could serve as an aggregation mechanism capable of bypassing bureaucratic and political obstacles to information sharing” among U.S. national security agencies. This “belief” is directly related to efforts of those same national security agencies immediately after the 9/11 attacks to blame the “siloeing of information” within agencies for the supposed “failure of imagination” that allowed the attacks to occur despite the ostensible efforts of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. This is, of course, despite the copious evidence pointing to the direct involvement of intelligence agencies in the 9/11 attacks and in the efforts to stifle any meaningful investigation into those attacks. Nevertheless, the intelligence community’s own narrative, backed by intelligence-linked contractors like Oracle’s Larry Ellison, was that extensive information sharing between federal agencies and their main contractors was necessary to prevent another 9/11-style attack from occurring.
These narratives set the stage for the deployment of intelligence-linked software programs that were promoted as solving these problems, first of Christine Maxwell’s Chiliad (Christine is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister) and followed by Peter Thiel’s Palantir. Then-CIA Chief Information Officer Alan Wade was closely connected to the origins of both Chiliad and Palantir. He had also been a close working partner of the DARPA office that would later host the surveillance program Total Information Awareness (TIA), a Palantir predecessor, as well as the DARPA-backed prediction market Hanson would help create.
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One of the reasons that TokenUnion has seemingly been erased from current narratives about both Coplan and Polymarket may lie in the TokenUnion’s close partnership and integration with Bancor. Bancor was created by Guy and Galia Benartzi, the nephew and niece of long-time and current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Galia Benartzi, immediately prior to creating Bancor, had been a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, where she helped lead the firm’s investments in Israel. One of the main tokens showcased in TokenUnion’s promotional material is Bancor’s BNT token and Bancor is listed among its small list of official partners. TokenUnion’s whitepaper also touted its “integration” with Bancor as one of its platform’s main advantages.
Bancor advisor Lou Kerner was also a TokenUnion advisor, alongside Jim Haft, with whom Kerner created CryptoOracle. CryptoOracle was founded in 2017 and, at the time its founders advised Coplan’s TokenUnion, it focused on supporting “early-stage blockchain firms.” This strongly suggests that CryptoOracle had backed Coplan’s company, which later claimed to have “raised millions in a private presale” from undisclosed sources. Like Bancor, CryptoOracle is also listed as a TokenUnion partner.
Kerner has major connections to the Israeli tech start-up scene, which even former Mossad directors have noted is stuffed with Israeli intelligence veterans and which –– per official Israeli policy –– is full of Israeli intelligence fronts posing as private companies in order to execute projects that were previously performed “in-house” by the Israeli intelligence apparatus. Kerner, who boasts close ties to AIPAC, previously led the Israel Founders Syndicate and is a current advisor of the Israeli Blockchain Association. Kerner is also partnered in an Israeli tech incubator alongside Glilot Capital. Glilot Capital was created by two Israeli military intelligence veterans who invest specifically in “entrepreneurs who emerge from the elite Unit 8200” signals intelligence unit, often likened to Israel’s equivalent of the NSA…”