Polymarket hires Zora co-founder Jacob Horne to revive onchain product
Polymarket has hired Jacob Horne, co-founder of Zora, to rebuild its onchain trading product. Horne left Zora eight days prior. He previously architected Coinbase's social-coin effort. The move comes as Polymarket competes with Kalshi, which powers Coinbase's U.S. prediction markets and has secured distribution across Robinhood, Webull, and Moomoo. Polymarket acquired CFTC-licensed exchange QCEX in 2025 and operates under a CFTC order of designation.
Horne's hire lands one week after Polymarket brought in its first CFO, Warren Jenson, showing leadership is being rebuilt in parallel. The platform needs product velocity fast: Kalshi already runs event contracts on Coinbase, Robinhood, Webull, and Moomoo, giving it a distribution moat that Polymarket cannot match with a standalone app. Horne's task is to make Polymarket's onchain product compelling enough to draw users away from familiar brokerage interfaces.
If he cannot ship before the football season peaks, Kalshi's brokerage lock-in will harden into habit. The social-coin failure at Coinbase is a warning signal: Horne's ideas have not always converted to retained users. Polymarket is betting that prediction-market traders care more about onchain mechanics than social-coin speculators did. Two quarters of Jenson's runway and Horne's build cycle now run on the same clock.