Polymarket hires former Zora CEO to lead on-chain products

Polymarket announced the hiring of former Zora CEO Jacob Horne to lead product efforts, focusing on its DeFi business. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan acknowledged that as the company scales, the performance of its on-chain products has "declined," with some long-term users believing that Polymarket has shifted its focus to the U.S. market. Coplan stated that the company is working to unify its products but did not disclose a specific launch timeline, nor did he mention adjustments regarding fees, liquidity, or routing.

Polymarket plans to hold a DeFi community meeting "soon" to gather feedback and announce a roadmap; in the meantime, users can provide feedback directly to Horne or Coplan. This appointment gives Horne broad product responsibilities rather than a specific engineering role. An earlier diagnosis came from Polymarket DeFi Engineering Vice President Josh Stevens, who noted on August 31 that the existing Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) is "full of technical debt." Although the team has scaled it tenfold and increased speed threefold, the underlying architecture still has flaws, and fixing one issue may trigger another.

Stevens stated that the existing codebase is "unsalvageable in the long run," and the matching engine is being rewritten from scratch in Rust, with the goal of completing it in the latter half of the fourth quarter. Early benchmarks show that the new system's p99 latency is 10 to 20 times faster than the current system, capable of processing 200,000 orders per second, approximately 15 times the existing capacity.