Mark Zuckerberg has pushed Meta’s leadership to explore partnerships with Polymarket and Kalshi, per a new New York Times report, days after a separate report revealed Meta is building its own prediction-market app called Arena.
Mark Zuckerberg has urged Meta’s senior leadership to explore partnerships with Polymarket and Kalshi, according to a New York Times report cited by The Block on Friday, days after the paper revealed Meta was building its own competing prediction-market app codenamed Arena.
The new reporting adds a partnership track to a strategy that had previously been framed as a build-it-themselves effort. The Block reported the development Friday, citing the Times. The Times reported three days earlier that Zuckerberg ordered a small team to build Arena, a standalone prediction-market app to be kept separate from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The partnership exploration is framed as exploratory, per the reporting.
Platform Precedent
Meta would not be the first major social platform to integrate prediction markets. X named Polymarket as its official prediction-market partner in June 2025, embedding live market probabilities and Grok-powered annotations alongside posts. A Meta partnership would offer a substantially larger potential audience: Meta’s Family of Apps reached 3.56 billion daily active people in Q1 2026, per the company’s earnings report.
Polymarket and Kalshi have expanded rapidly over the past year. Combined event-contract trading volume crossed $60 billion in 2026, drawing institutional market makers including Wintermute as liquidity providers. Kalshi closed a $1 billion raise at a $22 billion valuation in May and is now targeting a $40 billion valuation in a new round, per reports this week.
Meta’s Dual Track
Zuckerberg’s push for partnerships alongside Arena’s development indicates Meta is evaluating both a proprietary platform and a distribution deal with incumbents, per the Times reporting. Insiders described Arena as experimental but a top priority within the company.
Meta briefly operated a prediction platform called Forecast from 2020 to 2022 before shutting it down due to low usage. The company’s renewed interest comes as Meta’s Family of Apps saw its daily active people count slip quarter-over-quarter for the first time in Q1 2026, a decline Meta attributed to internet disruptions in Iran and a restriction on access to WhatsApp in Russia.
Polymarket and Kalshi have each made no public statement on the reported partnership interest. Meta has made no public announcement about the partnership exploration.
