Meta Is Building “Arena,” a Prediction Market App to Compete With Kalshi and Polymarket
Mark Zuckerberg has assembled a small internal team to build "Arena," a standalone prediction market app that would compete directly with Kalshi and Polymarket. The project is early-stage and may not launch, but Meta's 3-billion-user reach would represent an unprecedented distribution threat to the sector.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, is developing a standalone mobile prediction market application internally codenamed “Arena,” according to a report from The New York Times citing unnamed employees familiar with the project. The app would position Meta as a direct competitor to established prediction market platforms including Kalshi and Polymarket, the two dominant players in the rapidly growing sector.
What We Know About Arena So Far
According to the Times report, Mark Zuckerberg personally assembled a small internal team to build Arena, which would operate as a separate application distinct from Meta’s existing social platforms. The project remains in its early stages, and sources cautioned that the app may not ultimately launch. Still, the reported initiative signals that Meta is closely monitoring the prediction market space and may be preparing to deploy its considerable resources into the sector.
Arena is expected to launch initially as a points-based system rather than a real-money platform, though sources indicated that a transition to real-money wagering has not been ruled out. The distinction matters from a regulatory standpoint, as real-money prediction markets in the United States operate under oversight from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a framework that Kalshi has navigated successfully and that Polymarket has begun to engage following years of offshore operations.
Meta’s Distribution Advantage in a Growing Market
Meta’s most powerful potential advantage in this space is distribution. The company’s family of apps reaches more than three billion users worldwide, dwarfing the current user bases of any existing prediction market platform. If Arena integrates social sharing features or cross-promotes within Facebook or Instagram, it could onboard prediction market participants at a scale the industry has never seen.
For context, Kalshi and Polymarket together processed roughly $50 billion in contract volume in 2025 and have surpassed $130 billion in combined volume in 2026 alone. Kalshi currently leads the U.S. prediction market landscape, recording approximately $18.36 billion in contract volume in June 2026 alone, compared to Polymarket’s $6.77 billion in non-U.S. volume and an additional $2 billion in U.S.-based activity during the same period.
Understanding how prediction markets work is central to grasping why Meta sees an opportunity here. These platforms allow participants to trade contracts tied to real-world outcomes, from sporting events to elections and economic data, in what functions as a crowd-sourced forecasting market. They have attracted significant retail and institutional interest as both speculative vehicles and genuine forecasting tools.
Meta’s Competitive Playbook and Its History With Prediction Markets
This is not Meta’s first attempt at a prediction-adjacent product. The company operated a platform called Forecast from 2020 to 2022, which functioned as a community forecasting tool using a points-based system. Forecast was quietly shut down after roughly two years without gaining significant traction. Arena, if it launches, would represent a more commercially ambitious undertaking and would benefit from lessons learned during that earlier effort.
Meta’s broader competitive playbook has a well-documented track record of identifying fast-growing platforms and building near-identical products to compete directly. The company replicated Snapchat’s Stories format across Instagram and Facebook in 2016, launched Reels to rival TikTok, and introduced Threads as a direct competitor to Twitter. The Arena project, if it follows the same pattern, would reflect a calculated bet that prediction markets are approaching mainstream adoption and that a first-mover advantage for Meta is still within reach.
What a Meta Entry Would Mean for Kalshi, Polymarket, and the Sector
The competitive pressure of a Meta entry would be felt most acutely by Kalshi and Polymarket, both of which have invested heavily in legal battles, regulatory engagement, and user acquisition in recent years. Kalshi secured a landmark legal victory in 2024 when a federal court permitted it to offer sports event contracts, a ruling that opened the door to expanded market offerings. Polymarket, which built much of its volume through offshore access, has been navigating a path toward U.S. regulatory compliance. A well-capitalized Meta product with billions of built-in users could compress the window of opportunity for both platforms to entrench before the market matures.
The prediction markets sector has emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments in consumer financial products. For bettors and prediction market participants, a Meta-backed platform would raise important questions about data privacy given the company’s history with user data and behavioral advertising. Whether Arena ultimately launches, and in what form, remains to be seen. What is clear is that Meta’s reported interest is another sign of the sector’s rapid ascent from a niche financial product toward a potential mass-market application.