Mark Zuckerberg has directed a small team at Meta to build a standalone prediction market app called Arena — designed to let users forecast outcomes in politics, sports, entertainment, and world affairs. The project is a top internal priority, per two employees with knowledge of the plans who spoke with the New York Times. Arena will operate independently from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, using Meta's combined audience of over 3.56 billion daily active users as its distribution engine — an immediate scale advantage no existing prediction market platform can match. The initial version will use a video game-style points system rather than real money, though real-money wagering hasn't been ruled out for the future. Meta previously launched a similar initiative called Forecast in 2020 before shutting it down in 2022. The revival comes as the sector eyes $1 trillion in annual trading volume by decade's end, and as Polymarket, Kalshi, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Kraken all expand into event contracts. Regulatory scrutiny over whether such products constitute gambling or legitimate financial instruments is intensifying alongside the market growth.
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The Ethereum Foundation will slash its budget by roughly 40% this year and cut 54 staff — about 20% of its workforce — as it restructures around five domain clusters and transitions to a lean endowment model, Vitalik Buterin confirmed in a blog post Tuesday. The goal: reduce annual spending from roughly 15% of treasury assets before 2026 to around 5% by 2030, making the organization self-sustaining indefinitely rather than drawing down capital. The restructuring also shuts down the Privacy and Scaling Explorations unit, shrinks Devcon to cut costs, and narrows the EF's institutional strategy. Co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned the same day, bringing the total number of senior departures since January to nine. Buterin acknowledged the human cost directly — "I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost" — but framed the cuts as a deliberate shift from breadth to longevity, with the foundation focusing exclusively on CROPS: censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security. Work the EF no longer funds is expected to migrate to Ethlabs, independent client teams, and AI-assisted formal verification tools.
Asset managers are accelerating plans to tokenize ETFs despite unresolved questions around regulation, trading infrastructure, and market structure — driven by investor demand and a fear of missing an early foothold in blockchain-based finance, BNY's Ben Slavin told CoinDesk. "We have a number of different projects in flight, different variants to effectively tokenize ETFs," said Slavin, global head of ETFs at BNY. The concern is real: third parties are already creating tokenized versions of existing ETFs that trade outside traditional financial markets without the original issuers' involvement — creating reputational risk for firms that wait too long. Pantera Capital's Q1 report put a number on the momentum: 168 new tokenization assets launched in 2025. The SEC now oversees more than $1 billion in tokenized money market funds. BlackRock's BUIDL fund alone has reached $2.1 billion in AUM. BNY is building and operating the custody and servicing infrastructure that other firms plug into — its Goldman Sachs DAP partnership providing the blockchain layer — positioning itself as the connective tissue of institutional tokenized finance rather than a direct product issuer.
