Mark Zuckerberg has tasked a small Meta team with building Arena, a prediction markets app set to rival [Polymarket and Kalshi(https://yellow.com/news/polymarket-corners-world-cup-kalshi-fees), the sector's two biggest names.
Key Points:
- Zuckerberg has directed a small Meta team to build Arena, a standalone prediction markets app aimed squarely at Polymarket and Kalshi.
- The app would likely launch with a video game style points system, though real money betting has not been ruled out.
- Meta plans to grow Arena by funneling users from its main apps, which reach billions of people every day.
Meta Builds Arena App
Zuckerberg recently directed the small team to build the standalone app, a plan that emerged this week through two people familiar with the work, which began only recently. Arena would run apart from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, keeping forecasting features in a separate space. Insiders frame the effort as experimental but a clear priority, part of a wider push to spin up apps around fresh online behavior as growth on its older platforms matures.
The app would likely start with a video game style points system rather than cash wagers, two people said, though Meta has not ruled out adding real money once the product matures and proves it can hold an audience. Meta Photos, another test app, would generate new media using artificial intelligence.
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Prediction Markets Boom
Prediction markets exploded in popularity around the 2024 U.S. election, then hardened into a fresh asset class for everyday traders chasing the next headline outcome. Robinhood and Interactive Brokers have since rolled out event contracts, widening retail access. Monthly bets across the sector hit a record near $30 billion last month, a jump of roughly 588 percent from a year earlier, while Kalshi drew a $22 billion valuation in May.
The growth has been impossible to ignore.
Sports have driven much of the surge, and during the World Cup one platform saw first time forecasting users triple in the opening week, with trading volume climbing sharply since kickoff. That momentum has unsettled established players, and DraftKings, Robinhood and Flutter Entertainment, the FanDuel parent, all slid on news of Meta's plan. Polymarket, by contrast, settles its bets in USDC (USDC) on the Polygon network, a crypto rail that Arena's free to play points system would deliberately skip, at least in its first version.
Meta's Copycat Playbook
For Meta, chasing a hot trend is a familiar move, one that has shaped several of its biggest products to date, each born by adapting a rival's breakout idea. Instagram Stories followed Snapchat, Reels arrived after TikTok, and Threads chased Twitter into a crowded market.
Whether Arena becomes a hit or stalls in testing remains unclear, since Meta has quietly shelved experimental apps before without ever shipping them widely. Still, the bet says plenty about its ambitions. Zuckerberg rarely lets a fast growing rival run unchallenged, and prediction markets have grown too large and too lucrative for Meta to wave off now.
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