Polymarket Hires Ex-Zora CEO for Onchain Product Push

Polymarket announced the hire of Jacob Horne, the former CEO of Zora, to oversee product work with a particular focus on the platform’s decentralized finance offering. CEO Shayne Coplan acknowledged that Polymarket’s onchain product performance has declined as the company scaled and said the business is working to unify its products, though he did not provide a launch timeline or detail any immediate changes to fees, liquidity, or routing. Internal engineering commentary identified Polymarket’s central limit order book (CLOB) as a core problem. According to the company’s documentation, the CLOB connects signed user orders with settlement on Polygon: users sign and submit orders to the CLOB, the exchange operator can match them, and matched trades settle onchain. VP of DeFi engineering Josh Stevens described the existing CLOB as “full of tech debt” and reported that attempts to patch issues risked creating new ones. Stevens said the team concluded the current codebase could not be saved long term and has begun rewriting the matching engine from scratch in Rust. Early benchmark figures shared by Stevens indicated potential improvements—10–20x better p99 latency and capacity around 200,000 orders per second, roughly 15 times current capacity—though the replacement had not been launched at the time he published those figures. Stevens also said the team will continue to maintain and iterate on the existing CLOB while building the new system, aiming to minimize and pre-announce breaking changes for integrators. Coplan said Polymarket will hold a DeFi town hall “soon” to gather user feedback and outline the company’s plan, and invited users to send input to Horne or himself. The company’s current fee structure—category-based taker fees on some markets, no maker fees, and fee-financed rebate programs—was not changed in the announcement, and Coplan did not commit to any alterations or a new liquidity program. The hire therefore places a senior product lead into an environment where significant infrastructure work is already underway.