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Meta head Mark Zuckerberg recently told his team to build an app called “Arena,” a prediction market where users bet on elections, Fed rate decisions, sports outcomes, and even whether US President Donald Trump will mention Chinese President Xi Jinping in a speech. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s basically Polymarket. Meta was in talks to acquire Kalshi, a competitor of Polymarket, but the deal fell apart. Probably because of this, Meta decided to build it itself.
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Arena will start with a points-based system, but real-money betting isn’t ruled out for later. The prediction app will not be tied to Facebook or Instagram, to keep antitrust regulators off its back. This is classic Zuckerberg: copy what works, then crush it with scale, as Meta has three billion monthly users.
Polymarket, founded in 2020 by Shayne Coplan, is a crypto- and blockchain-based prediction market. Users buy “Yes” or “No” shares on outcomes using USDC. Share prices reflect what the crowd thinks will happen.
Here’s the clever part. Polymarket always said they were trading “event contracts,” not gambling. But in 2022, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined them US$1.4 million (HK$10.92 million) and told them to stop serving US users. They paid up and went offshore.
In 2025, they spent US$112 million to buy QCEX, a small CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange, and the CFTC quickly approved the deal. Since then, Polymarket has been able to legally serve Americans through this licensed entity. The Department of Justice and CFTC also closed their investigations, probably due to a lot of lobbying.
Polymarket frames the product as “event contracts,” a type of commodity derivative under federal law. That means federal rules apply, not state gambling laws. This is a smart move, as the latter is at the state level and requires state-by-state clearance, whereas with the CFTC as a federal regulator, federal preemption applies.
Zuckerberg’s track record, in the early years, was solid. Reels copied TikTok, Threads copied Twitter. Instagram and WhatsApp were acquisitions that paid off. But for his recent bets? The metaverse flopped. Meta’s AI started strong, but then researchers left. So Arena could go either way. And in places like Hong Kong, Polymarket still faces gambling ordinance challenges, and regulators are likely to ban Polymarket soon.
Allen Au is a tech startup founder, AI architect, and YouTuber