Meta reportedly builds standalone prediction-market app to rival Polymarket and Kalshi

Mark Zuckerberg has directed a small internal team to build Arena, a standalone prediction-market app meant to compete with Polymarket and Kalshi. The project would sit outside Facebook and Instagram, and early versions could use play money or points instead of real-money wagering, signaling a fresh attempt to capture attention with betting-style engagement.

The business logic is blunt. More than 3 billion people use at least one Meta app every day, giving the company an unmatched distribution engine for any new format that can keep users tapping, scrolling and returning. Prediction markets sit close to the line between forecasting and gambling, and that ambiguity is exactly what can make them attractive to a platform under pressure to grow. They turn sports, politics and cultural speculation into repeat interaction, and repeat interaction is what Meta sells.

That push lands after Meta tightened its gambling-ad rules in July 2025 on Facebook and Instagram, requiring advertisers to go through a permissions and verifications process and to prove they hold gambling licenses for promotions tied to online sports betting, online casinos, poker, lotteries and related products. Meta has framed those rules as a response to illegal and unlicensed operators, but the gap between policy and enforcement remains large. A 2026 Rest of World investigation found Meta running hundreds of illegal gambling ads in at least 13 countries, including at least 140 banned ads in India in December alone.

Meta has also said it removed more than 159 million scam ads in 2025, a figure that underscores how much low-quality and illicit commercial content still strains its systems. For users, the concern is not just exposure to ads, but the normalization of money-making schemes that borrow from gambling’s psychology while operating through a social platform that reaches families, teenagers and low-income communities at massive scale. Those users are often least protected when platforms blur entertainment, speculation and wagering.

The market reaction showed how seriously Wall Street is taking the new category. CNBC said Meta’s prediction-market push helped drag down shares of gambling companies, including DraftKings and Flutter Entertainment, after the news broke. That response points to a broader pattern now visible across big tech: platforms are borrowing the most addictive monetization mechanics from adjacent industries, then wrapping them in product design and scale that can make risky behavior feel frictionless.