Meta's Zuckerberg Eyes Polymarket and Kalshi Deals for Arena

Mark Zuckerberg has asked Meta executives to explore partnerships with Polymarket and Kalshi, according to The New York Times, alongside building a standalone app internally called Arena. Zuckerberg personally assembled a small team to develop it, and the project has reportedly been described as experimental but a top priority.

Arena is currently designed around a points-based system rather than real-money wagers, though Meta has reportedly not ruled out introducing real-money betting in the future. The target is at least 100 million monthly active predictors aged 18 to 34. Combined with Meta's reach of more than 3.5 billion daily users across its platforms, that ambition is what makes the partnership angle interesting: Polymarket and Kalshi could gain user distribution that no organic growth plan would match.

Prediction market trading volumes grew from roughly $50 billion in 2025 to more than $130 billion in 2026, and Bernstein analysts have projected the sector could reach $1 trillion in annual volume by the end of the decade. TechCrunch reported that X had already partnered with Polymarket in summer 2025, framing Meta's interest as part of a broader pattern of large platforms moving toward prediction infrastructure. Zuckerberg has reportedly described prediction markets as "an emerging form of social behaviour on the internet."

The caveats are material. Arena remains in early development and, per people familiar with the matter, may not necessarily be launched. Meta tried this before: it introduced a crowdsourced prediction app called Forecast in 2020 and shut it down in 2022 after limited traction. The regulatory picture adds friction too, with states having sued prediction market platforms over gambling law violations, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's oversight role expanding, and a former special forces member reportedly charged with insider trading on a Polymarket bet.

What the reporting does not give you is the structure of any potential deal with Polymarket or Kalshi: whether Meta would act as a distribution channel, take a revenue share, or embed market feeds in its apps. That structure determines whether those platforms would see this as a growth catalyst or a competitive threat wearing partnership language.