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Mark Zuckerberg has directed a small team at Meta to build a standalone prediction markets app internally called Arena, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The app would operate independently from Facebook and Instagram, though Meta could direct users from its existing platforms toward it. Arena would initially use a video game-style points system rather than real-money wagering, though Meta has not ruled out introducing cash betting in the future.

The project is described internally as experimental but a top priority. Meta's usage of points instead of real money matters could allow it to sidestep regulatory questions currently facing prediction markets as the CFTC and state gambling regulators fight for oversight. 

Meta in early 2026 reported 3.56 billion daily active users across its apps, dwarfing the combined reach of Polymarket and Kalshi many times over.

This is not Meta's first attempt at launching a prediction market. The company launched a similar product called Forecast in 2020 but shut it down in 2022.

Cboe Global Markets launched its first prediction markets products Tuesday under a new suite called Cboe Predicts, offering binary option contracts on the Mini-S&P 500 Index (XSP). The contracts, listed as XSPBW and XSPBX, are now available on Interactive Brokers, with Charles Schwab expected to follow in coming months.

Each contract works as a simple yes-or-no bet: a "yes" position pays $100 if the index settles at or above a specified level, and $0 otherwise. The "no" position pays out in reverse. All contracts clear through the Options Clearing Corporation, giving them the same institutional risk management infrastructure as standard listed options. That regulatory wrapper is the key differentiator from Polymarket and Kalshi, which have spent the year fighting state gaming regulators over whether their products constitute gambling. Cboe's XSP binary contracts are securities-based options and trade within the standard U.S.-listed options framework.

Cboe also plans to introduce XSP vertical spreads via a proprietary system called the Quoted Spread Book, designed to help retail traders graduate from yes/no contracts to more advanced options strategies.

Five Senate Democrats — including Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Ron Wyden — wrote to the chairs of five Senate committees Tuesday demanding immediate hearings into a $500 million investment by UAE-linked officials in World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture co-founded by President Trump and his family.

The deal was signed four days before Trump's inauguration, according to a January Wall Street Journal report, which said the deal gave UAE royal and national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan a 49% stake in the company. Tahnoon reportedly paid $218 million upfront to entities tied to the Trump family and Steve Witkoff, Trump's lead diplomat for the Middle East and Russia. 

Within months of the reported deal, the Trump administration approved a $1.4 billion arms sale to the UAE and authorized the transfer of 35,000 advanced Nvidia Blackwell chips to UAE AI firm G42, also chaired by Tahnoon, despite warnings from U.S. intelligence that China could access the technology through the firm.

The senators are seeking sworn testimony on what administration officials knew, and when, about payments to the president's family and his top Middle East diplomat.

The Ethereum Foundation cut 54 staff members Tuesday, eliminating roughly 20% of its total headcount in what it described as the conclusion of a months-long reorganization. The same day, co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced the Foundation would slash its annual budget by roughly 40%, targeting a shift from spending around 15% of remaining treasury assets per year to a long-term ceiling of roughly 5% by 2030.

The cuts follow a leadership exodus that began in January. Both co-executive directors have now resigned — Tomasz Stańczak in February, Hsiao-Wei Wang earlier this month — bringing total senior departures to nine since the year began. Bastian Aue, a board member, has assumed expanded responsibilities during the transition.

The EF is restructuring around five work clusters: protocol, access, user, community, and institutional layers. Specific changes include winding down the Privacy and Scaling Explorations unit, scaling back Devcon, and leaning more heavily on AI-assisted formal verification for protocol work. ETHLabs, a new non-profit backed by treasury companies BitMine and SharpLink and co-founder Joseph Lubin, launched this week as a parallel ecosystem effort.

Michael Saylor's newest preferred stock was supposed to trade around its $100 par value. Instead it's stuck in the high $80s, closing at $88.79 Monday after hitting a record low of $82.53 last week.

A Bitcoin rebound didn't help. Neither did Strategy padding its cash reserves to $1.4 billion. So what's actually dragging STRC down — short sellers, a rotation into Strive's SATA, unwinding leverage, or something less dramatic?

We break down every theory, why the "death spiral" crowd may be getting ahead of itself, the tools Strategy still has to push STRC back to par, and the two numbers to watch for a recovery.

This week on Uneasy Money: jaredfromsubway.eth, Ethereum's most active sandwich bot, got drained for ~$7.5M by a counter-MEV honeypot that turned its own logic against it — and the operator is now threatening to sue.

Kain Warwick, Taylor Monahan, and Luca Netz also take on the breakaway Ethlabs, fomo's $75M raise, and the WSJ's Polymarket report.

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