Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have become big business lately. Earlier this year, for example, Polymarket saw users spend $425 million in a single day.
Sites like Polymarket and Kalshi allow people to bet on nearly anything, including sports, entertainment, finance, and politics.
According to a report from the New York Times, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants a piece of the prediction market action. The company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp recently had a team create a new prediction market smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi.
Internally, Meta’s prediction market app is known as “Arena.”
Unlike Polymarket and Kalshi, however, Arena isn’t set up to accept real-money bets. Instead, Meta’s prediction market acts more like a game in that regard, with in-app points awarded and wagered.
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Arena is currently being tested internally at Meta. There are no plans to release the app to the public at this time. In fact, the app may never be released. However, according to the New York Times’ sources, Meta isn’t ruling out adding actual monetary betting to the app if it did indeed go live.
As the report points out, Meta previously experimented with a prediction market app well before Polymarket and Kalshi. Back in 2020, the company released an app called Forecast, which asked users to guess what the world would look like after the COVID-19 pandemic. Meta closed Forecast in 2022.
Meta has attempted to create standalone apps separate from its Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms before, often with little success. For example, the company launched a standalone viral clips app, Lasso, in 2018. The app was positioned to be a competitor to TikTok. Meta shut down Lasso less than two years later.
Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have been under intense scrutiny in recent months. Investigations have uncovered that these platforms are rife with issues such as insider trading and often engage in deceptive marketing to attract users.
With that said, the popularity of prediction markets has continued to surge. And Meta has a track record of following the trends – just look at the Metaverse or Meta’s attempt to launch a cryptocurrency – so it should be no surprise that the company has developed a prediction market. The real question now is whether or not they launch it.