Meta quietly pilots prediction markets with credibility points
Meta is testing a prediction-market application internally, according to The Block’s Nov. 14, 2026 newsletter, marking the social media giant’s most concrete step yet into a sector that has moved from crypto’s fringes to the centre of a regulatory fight.
The app, currently called Takes, is being trialled with Meta employees rather than the public. It departs from the real-money model used by established platforms: participants stake “cred”, points described as shorthand for “credibility”. Users earn cred for correct predictions and lose it when they get things wrong. There is no cash wagering involved at this stage.
The project first surfaced in June under the name Arena, after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg directed employees to build a standalone prediction-market product. Takes is not publicly available, and Meta has reportedly not decided whether to launch it at all. What began as an internal directive has now matured into a functioning internal prototype, which suggests the company sees enough potential to invest engineering resources even before resolving the regulatory question.
The timing is telling. Established prediction-market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket are facing lawsuits from U.S. states over their event contracts. State regulators have taken issue with the way these platforms structure their markets, and the legal boundaries remain unsettled. Meta appears to be probing the sector while keeping one foot outside the door, using a points-based system that sidesteps the real-money question entirely.
That design choice may prove to be the most consequential detail in the story. If Meta eventually launches a credibility-based prediction product to its billions of users, it could normalise forecasting markets at a scale no crypto-native platform has achieved, without ever touching regulated financial products. It would also give the company a vast trove of aggregated crowd-sourced forecasts, a commodity with obvious commercial value to advertisers and content systems.
For the prediction-market sector itself, Meta’s interest is a double-edged development. On one hand, entrance by a technology giant validates the category. On the other, a points-based product from Meta could compete for attention and engagement with the real-money platforms currently fighting state lawsuits, potentially blunting their growth even as they defend their legal position.
Readers following the wider trend can find more in our DeFi coverage, where prediction markets have become one of the fastest-growing corners of on-chain activity.
DOJ wins approval to seize $1.2 billion tied to Binance hack
The U.S. Department of Justice has obtained court approval to seize or restrain more than $1.2 billion allegedly stolen in the Binance hack, one of the largest single asset-recovery actions ever recorded in the crypto sector.
Investigators attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, a group of North Korean military hackers. The group reportedly stole more than $6 billion from Binance in October. The seizure action covers roughly a fifth of the stolen amount, and forms part of a broader enforcement effort that has frozen more than $2.7 billion in stolen crypto overall, achieved through cooperation between U.S. authorities and private companies.
The scale of the underlying theft is staggering. A $6 billion breach would rank among the largest crypto heists on record, and the fact that U.S. authorities have already immobilised $1.2 billion of the proceeds demonstrates how far blockchain forensics has advanced. The old assumption that stolen crypto is gone the moment it leaves the exchange is no longer tenable.
The case matters for several reasons. First, it shows that tracing and immobilising digital assets can continue long after a hack, even when funds move across wallets and mixing services. Criminals who once relied on the pseudonymity of blockchain transfers now face an industry of analytics firms working alongside federal investigators, and the $2.7 billion in frozen assets across the broader effort is evidence of that machinery at work.
Second, the attribution to TraderTraitor places the incident within a well-documented pattern of North Korean crypto theft. The country’s hacking units have become a persistent feature of the crypto security landscape, targeting exchanges, bridges and decentralised finance protocols. A $6 billion theft attributed to a state-linked group raises uncomfortable questions about the security posture of even the largest exchanges, and about the concentration risk inherent in centralised custody.
Third, the legal mechanics matter. A court-approved seizure or restraint order over more than $1.2 billion in crypto assets is a significant exercise of judicial power over digital property. It signals to victims that recovery is possible, and to attackers that proceeds are not safe even after laundering attempts. It also signals to exchanges and custodians that cooperation with U.S. authorities can yield results, reinforcing the public-private model that produced the $2.7 billion in frozen funds.
For exchanges, the implications are direct. The Binance hack and its aftermath will sharpen scrutiny of custody arrangements, withdrawal controls and cold-storage practices across the industry. Regulators and insurers alike will look at the incident as a case study in what can go wrong, and in what recovery can achieve when it does.
More on exchange security and enforcement actions can be found in our Bitcoin coverage.
FBI-linked FaceStealer operation dismantled after $400 million theft spree
In a separate action, the DOJ seized cloud infrastructure linked to FaceStealer, a North Korean scheme identified by the FBI. Authorities say the operation generated more than $400 million in crypto theft over 18 months.
The seizure of infrastructure, rather than funds, represents a different enforcement tool. Where the Binance case demonstrates asset tracing and restraint, the FaceStealer action shows authorities disrupting the operational backbone of a criminal scheme. Taking down the cloud infrastructure behind a theft operation can halt ongoing attacks and degrade the group’s capacity to target new victims, even if the stolen funds themselves remain at large.
The numbers involved are sobering. More than $400 million stolen in 18 months works out to an extraordinary monthly haul, and the FBI’s identification of the scheme suggests it had been under investigation for some time before the infrastructure seizure. The pace of the theft underscores the industrial scale of state-linked crypto crime.
Taken together, the two DOJ actions illustrate a shift in enforcement strategy. Authorities are no longer limited to chasing funds after the fact. They are combining asset seizure, infrastructure disruption and blockchain tracing into a layered approach. Each tool addresses a different point of vulnerability for criminal groups: their money, their servers and their on-chain footprints.
What this means for markets and regulation
The week’s developments point in two directions at once.
On the enforcement side, the message to the crypto industry is that state-linked theft has become a first-order risk. North Korean groups are not opportunistic hackers; they are organised, well-resourced and persistent, capable of extracting billions from a single target. Exchanges, custodians and DeFi protocols should read the Binance and FaceStealer cases as evidence that security budgets must match an adversary of this calibre.
At the same time, the recovery figures offer genuine reassurance. More than $2.7 billion in stolen crypto frozen through public-private cooperation is not a trivial sum, and the $1.2 billion restrained in the Binance case shows that the window for laundering stolen funds is narrowing. This dynamic, sustained over time, could alter the economics of large-scale crypto theft, raising the cost and lowering the expected return of major hacks.
On the prediction-market side, Meta’s internal test is the clearest signal yet that forecasting markets are heading toward the mainstream, whatever the outcome of the state lawsuits against Kalshi and Polymarket. If Meta proceeds with a points-based product, it could bring prediction markets to an audience measured in the billions while sidestepping the regulatory fights that its real-money rivals are now waging. If it does not, the fact that Zuckerberg directed employees to build the product at all confirms that the sector’s growth has caught the attention of the largest platforms.
The unresolved question is regulatory. Event contracts remain contested at the state level in the U.S., and a points-based system may or may not fall within the definition of gambling or trading that regulators are still arguing over. Meta’s decision to test with credibility points rather than cash suggests the company is aware of exactly where the legal lines are drawn, and is designing around them.
For now, the sector’s trajectory is clear. Enforcement is getting sharper, theft is getting bigger, and the biggest technology companies in the world are circling prediction markets. The coming months will show whether Meta commits to a launch, whether Kalshi and Polymarket survive their legal challenges, and whether the frozen $1.2 billion becomes a template for recovering the rest of the $6 billion taken from Binance.
