Polymarket Hires Ex-Zora CEO for Onchain Product Push

Polymarket has hired former Zora CEO Jacob Horne to work on product with an emphasis on its DeFi offering, as CEO Shayne Coplan acknowledged that the performance of the prediction market’s onchain product has “waned” while the company scaled.

Coplan said some longtime users believed Polymarket had shifted its focus to the U.S. business. He said the company is working to unify its products, but did not specify a launch date or identify any fee, liquidity or routing changes.

Polymarket will hold a DeFi town hall “soon” to collect feedback and lay out its plan, Coplan said. He invited users to send feedback directly to Horne or himself in the meantime.

The announcement gives Horne a broad product mandate rather than a defined engineering role. The clearest diagnosis from inside Polymarket came weeks before the hire: problems in the central limit order book, or CLOB, where users submit signed orders and the exchange operator can match them.

The CLOB Is the Clearest Fault Line

Polymarket’s documentation describes the CLOB as connecting signed orders with settlement on Polygon. Users sign and submit orders to the CLOB, the exchange operator can match them, and matched trades settle on Polygon.

On Aug. 31, Polymarket’s vice president of DeFi engineering, Josh Stevens, called the existing CLOB “full of tech debt.” He said the team had scaled it tenfold and made it three times faster, but that its foundations remained flawed and attempts to repair one problem could cause another.

Stevens wrote that “the conclusion now is that the codebase can’t be saved long-term.” He said the matching engine is being rewritten from scratch in Rust, with a target of mid-to-late fourth quarter.

Stevens reported early benchmark figures of 10 to 20 times faster p99, or 99th-percentile, latency than the current system and capacity of 200,000 orders per second, about 15 times current capacity. The replacement had not launched when he published the figures.

Fees remain a separate product issue. Polymarket’s current documentation says it charges category-based taker fees on certain markets, while makers pay no fees and collected fees finance rebate programs. Coplan’s announcement did not commit to changing that structure or introduce a new liquidity program.

The hire therefore adds a senior product figure to an infrastructure repair already underway. Stevens said the team would maintain and keep improving the existing CLOB while building its replacement alongside it, with breaking changes for integrators kept minimal and communicated in advance.