Polymarket Adds Former Zora CEO Jacob Horne to Work on DeFi Product

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan said on Sept. 17 that Jacob Horne, previously the CEO of Zora, has joined Polymarket. Horne “will be working closely with me on product, in particular making Polymarket DeFi great again,” Coplan wrote in a post on X.

Coplan gave no formal title for Horne, and the announcement disclosed no start date or compensation. Coplan called Horne “amongst the best product and innovation minds in crypto,” said he “built multiple beautiful products,” and noted he was one of the first users of the first version in 2020.

Town hall planned, feedback invited

Coplan said Polymarket will host “a Polymarket DeFi town hall soon” to hear from longtime users and “lay out the plan” for the DeFi product; he gave no date for the event. In the meantime, he invited users to send feedback directly to Horne or himself, writing, “we’ll action it.”

Coplan says onchain performance has “waned”

In the same post, Coplan addressed the state of Polymarket’s existing onchain product. “We know the performance of the onchain product has waned as we’ve scaled,” he wrote, saying it hurt to hear frustration from longtime users who felt the company had pivoted all of its focus to the U.S. business. He said the team is “working behind the scenes to unify the products” and make Polymarket better “across all surface areas.”

The post stated no launch date for that unified product and no specific fee, liquidity, or order-routing changes.

DeFi exchange being rebuilt in Rust

The hire comes weeks after an Aug. 31 post on X from Josh Stevens, who said he had joined Polymarket and built out the team behind its DeFi exchange. Stevens wrote that the company’s DeFi central limit order book, or CLOB, “is full of tech debt.” He said the team had “scaled it 10x and made it 3x faster” but concluded “the codebase can’t be saved long-term,” calling the exchange “the heart of Polymarket” because everything runs through it.

Stevens said the exchange is being rewritten from scratch in Rust. He reported early figures of 10-20x faster p99 latency than the current system and throughput of 200,000 orders per second — “15x what we have now, with room to reach 400,000+” — which he presented as benchmark numbers; the new exchange has not launched. He said building in Rust provides “memory safety with no garbage collector,” meaning “no random pauses and no random latency spikes.”

Stevens said the team is “aiming to have the exchange ready sometime in Q4 (mid to end).” He said breaking changes “will be minimal for all integrators” and communicated in advance, and that the team “will maintain the existing CLOB and keep trying to improve it” while the replacement is built alongside it.

Neither post gave a firm date for when users will see changes in the live product: the DeFi town hall has no announced date, the product unification effort has no launch date, and the Rust exchange carries a Q4 readiness target rather than a confirmed launch.