Meta pushes Arena as prediction-market app

Meta has been pushing employees to build Arena, a prediction-market app that would let users forecast outcomes in politics, sports, entertainment and world affairs. The project would likely start with points rather than cash wagers, unlike Polymarket and Kalshi, although real-money betting has not been ruled out.

According to CoinMarketCap, which cited a New York Times report, people close to the matter described Arena as experimental but a top priority inside Meta. The project also fits a broader effort by Mark Zuckerberg to build new apps around emerging social behaviour online.

Meta has tried a similar product before. It launched Forecast in 2020, during the early stages of the Covid pandemic, to let users make predictions about current events and trends, and shut it down in 2022.

Mother Jones, also citing the Times, reported that Zuckerberg has considered partnering with Polymarket and Kalshi while developing Arena in-house. It said the app is aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds and that Meta hopes to fold parts of it into Facebook and Messenger by attaching betting options to group chats, news feeds and videos.

Ime Archibong, the senior Meta official leading Arena’s development, framed the idea as social in an internal post. He wrote that “The social conversation is the payoff as people aim to show off how good they are at predicting things to their friends.” He added that when markets are built into a personalised feed, they stop feeling like something for traders and start to feel like part of the conversation tied to memes and moments.

The broader prediction-market business has been expanding sharply since 2022. CoinMarketCap said Polymarket drew wide attention during the 2024 US presidential election, when traders used the crypto-based platform to bet on the result and generated billions of dollars in trading volume.

The sector is also facing closer scrutiny. CNBC reported on Aug. 14 that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is conducting an internal review into “mention markets”, contracts that speculate on whether specific words will be used in a speech, a corporate earnings call or a television broadcast. Brookings has described prediction markets as swaps tied to binary outcomes, placing the legal fight over these products at the centre of the debate over whether they are financial instruments or gambling products.