Quick Overview

• Meta is building “Arena,” a forecasting platform enabling users to predict outcomes using points rather than actual currency.
• The platform will encompass political events, sporting matches, cultural happenings, and global news, functioning as a standalone product separate from Instagram and Facebook.
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg has designated Arena as a high-level internal initiative, despite its experimental classification.
• The company previously launched and discontinued a comparable service named Forecast between 2020 and 2022.
• While prediction markets continue expanding rapidly, they’re encountering heightened regulatory oversight concerning gaming regulations and potential market manipulation.

Meta, the organization behind Facebook, is constructing a mobile application named Arena designed as a forecasting platform. The service will enable participants to predict results of actual events spanning electoral contests, athletic competitions, and cultural phenomena. The New York Times reported details from two informed employees, noting the application will employ a points mechanism instead of monetary transactions.

Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally directed Arena’s creation, according to sources. The New York Times’ contacts characterized the initiative as simultaneously experimental and strategically significant for the corporation.

Arena will operate as an independent entity distinct from Meta’s current portfolio, which includes Facebook and Instagram. This standalone approach differs from Meta’s typical strategy of incorporating new capabilities into established platforms.

Meta Platforms, Inc., META

A Second Attempt at Forecasting

This represents Meta’s second venture into prediction platforms. In 2020, the company introduced Forecast, allowing participants to make predictions about current affairs and developments during the Covid-19 outbreak. The service was discontinued in 2022.

Meta has previously explored cryptocurrency and financial technology initiatives. The company unveiled Libra, a digital currency project, in 2019, which became Diem before being abandoned in 2022. Recently, Meta introduced USDC payment options for content creators in Colombia and the Philippines.

Should Arena launch successfully, it would enter direct competition with established platforms including Polymarket and Kalshi, both experiencing substantial growth. Polymarket attracted significant attention throughout the 2024 presidential election cycle, processing billions in transaction volume. With Meta recording 3.56 billion daily active participants across its ecosystem by March 2026, Arena could access an enormous existing user base.

Additional major technology companies have entered the forecasting sector. Coinbase and Kraken have investigated opportunities in this market, while Robinhood has launched event contracts connected to political developments and economic indicators.

Regulatory Challenges Intensify

The forecasting platform sector faces mounting legal challenges across the United States. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission continues disputes with state-level authorities regarding whether specific event contracts constitute illegal gambling activities.

Congress is evaluating proposed legislation addressing insider trading concerns on forecasting platforms. These efforts intensified following allegations against U.S. soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who reportedly earned over $400,000 through a Polymarket position related to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s potential capture. Van Dyke’s trial is scheduled for December 2026.

Meta hasn’t announced a definitive launch timeline for Arena, nor has the company dismissed the possibility of incorporating real-money wagering features in the future.

SecondFi, a Cardano ecosystem wallet project, said it has traced a recent security incident to its native Cardano web wallet generation software. 

The team said it had contained the issue and paused affected services while it reviewed the full scope.

“We have isolated the root cause of the recent security incident,” said SecondFi in a security update. “The issue was confined to our native Cardano web wallet generation software.”

SecondFi said its on-chain review put the preliminary scale at around 16 million ADA. The team also said it was working with a blockchain security firm on an independent technical review.

SlowMist founder sees larger loss risk

SlowMist founder Cos, also known as Yu Xian, said the damage could be far larger than SecondFi’s early figure. He said the estimate depends on whether two Cardano addresses he tracked are confirmed as attacker wallets.

“The users of this wallet have likely lost over $20 million,” said SlowMist founder Cos in an X post. He said the possible loss may involve more than 129 million ADA and other tokens.

Cos later said the transaction pattern suggested an attacker may have obtained a batch of mnemonic phrases or private keys before moving funds over many hours. He said the transfers appeared to move from larger amounts to smaller ones.

Users wait for final review

SecondFi has not yet released a final technical report or a detailed compensation plan. The project said it would continue to share updates as the independent review confirms the scope and cause.

The case has drawn attention because the issue involves wallet generation, not only a smart contract or front-end error. If key generation fails, wallets created through the affected software may face direct risk.

SecondFi is the successor to Yoroi and was launched by EMURGO as a self-custody neofinance app for spending, trading, earning and saving. Cardano’s official app catalog lists SecondFi as a self-custody platform built by EMURGO.

As previously reported by crypto.news, Cardano has already faced market and ecosystem pressure this month. ADA fell below $0.20 in June, while several Cardano projects and governance fights drew wider attention. At press time, ADA traded at around $0.15, down almost 3% in the past 24 hours.

Security concerns spread beyond Cardano

The SecondFi case adds to a wider run of crypto wallet and platform security issues. In a recent update, crypto.news covered Trezor Safe 7 after Ledger Donjon found a chip flaw, though Trezor said user funds remained safe.

Previously, crypto.news explored Bo Shen’s reopened $42 million wallet hack case. SlowMist had linked that theft to a compromised mnemonic seed phrase, showing how seed phrase exposure can leave lasting recovery problems.

SecondFi users now need to follow only official project channels and avoid support scams. Breach events often trigger fake recovery accounts that ask for seed phrases, private keys or transfers.

The final loss figure remains unconfirmed. For now, SecondFi’s public estimate stands near 16 million ADA, while SlowMist’s Cos says suspected hacker activity could push possible user losses above $20 million.

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved sweeping housing legislation that also contains a temporary prohibition on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), delivering a significant policy victory for lawmakers who have sought to limit central-bank involvement in tokenized money. The measure now moves to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign the bill into law.

According to the official House roll call, the chamber passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by a wide margin of 358–32 on Tuesday, following a similarly large vote in the Senate the day before. The bill is designed primarily to address housing affordability, but its CBDC provision—and its stablecoin carve-out—has become the most closely monitored part for the crypto and financial-services sector.

Key takeaways

• The House passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, with a CBDC restriction aimed at preventing the Federal Reserve from issuing or creating a CBDC or substantially similar digital asset until Dec. 31, 2030.
• The ban is not absolute across all crypto activity: the legislation includes a carve-out for certain dollar-denominated stablecoins described as open, permissionless, and private.
• Congressional leaders reached agreement on the bill only after earlier disagreements, indicating that the CBDC language remained a negotiable but preserved feature.
• The legislation now goes to the president for final approval, potentially shaping how financial institutions and crypto firms prepare for compliance over the 2020s.

What the bill does: a time-limited CBDC prohibition

The CBDC clause included in the housing act would bar the Federal Reserve from, “directly or indirectly,” issuing or creating a central bank digital currency—or any digital asset “substantially similar” to a CBDC—until Dec. 31, 2030. While the language is time-bound, it is intended to constrain central-bank experimentation or deployment of a tokenized central-bank form of money during the remainder of the decade.

In practice, such a restriction can influence institutional planning in several ways. Banks and other regulated financial intermediaries typically rely on clear regulatory signals for product development and risk management. By limiting the Federal Reserve’s ability to pursue a CBDC initiative through direct issuance or creation, the statute aims to reduce uncertainty for firms that view CBDCs as a shift toward centrally controlled settlement rails.

At the same time, the clause’s “substantially similar” formulation may raise interpretive questions about what qualifies as prohibited activity. Institutions subject to supervision may need to evaluate not only explicit CBDC proposals, but also any related digital-asset products that could arguably be characterized as CBDC-like. That creates compliance demand even without a CBDC being launched.

Stablecoin carve-out: narrowing the scope of the restriction

The act also incorporates a carve-out for crypto stablecoins, permitting “dollar-denominated currency” that is described as open, permissionless, and private. This drafting choice signals a legislative intent to avoid an outright ban on stablecoin functionality while still constraining the central-bank issuance of a tokenized form of fiat.

From a policy perspective, the carve-out may be read as an attempt to separate the stablecoin market—particularly private-sector dollar-linked tokens—from central-bank-issued digital currencies. For compliance teams, this distinction matters because it suggests that the bill focuses on the Federal Reserve’s role rather than imposing a blanket prohibition on stablecoin issuance or use.

However, the carve-out’s descriptors—open, permissionless, and private—could require further interpretation depending on how regulators treat access, governance, and transaction privacy. Regulated firms generally maintain compliance controls around transparency, recordkeeping, and supervisory reporting; “private” systems may require additional legal and operational review to ensure they do not undermine auditability or AML obligations.

Legislative momentum and the path to law

The bill’s rapid movement reflects a last-minute agreement among House and Senate leadership on the broader housing measure. According to reporting by Cointelegraph, the House passage followed a prior Senate vote, with the CBDC language carried through negotiations and preserved from earlier versions.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott praised the outcome, framing it as a victory for families while emphasizing that Congress had delivered on a long-standing policy objective. The inclusion of the CBDC prohibition has been repeatedly pursued by Republican lawmakers for years, including through earlier legislation that did not advance to enactment.

One notable precursor was a CBDC-focused proposal from Representative Tom Emmer, the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, introduced in June 2025 and passed by the House in July. Despite clearing the House, it did not move forward in the Senate. The housing bill therefore represents a different legislative route—embedding the CBDC restriction within a must-pass or priority bill—suggesting lawmakers may be using vehicle legislation to achieve digital-asset policy goals when standalone bills stall.

Broader compliance and regulatory implications

For regulated entities, the immediate compliance relevance is the signal the statute sends about congressional boundaries around central-bank digital money. Although the restriction targets the Federal Reserve directly, its presence can affect how other regulators interpret the policy environment in which they supervise payments, tokenized assets, and stablecoins.

Institutions also face a multi-jurisdiction landscape. While the U.S. action is domestic, firms with global operations must continue planning for foreign frameworks such as the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regime. Differences in approach—particularly around token classification, issuer obligations, and stablecoin rules—mean the U.S. CBDC ban may not harmonize with European requirements for reserve management, authorization, and ongoing disclosures.

On enforcement and risk, the bill does not replace existing AML/KYC expectations or consumer-protection rules for crypto and financial intermediaries. Rather, it modifies one dimension of the policy map: the ability of the Federal Reserve to issue or create a CBDC-like digital asset. Compliance programs must therefore remain focused on counterparty due diligence, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, and recordkeeping, while also tracking whether any new regulatory guidance emerges to clarify how “substantially similar” assets will be treated.

What to watch next

The measure’s next milestone is presidential approval. After the bill becomes law, market participants and supervised entities will likely focus on interpretive clarity around the “substantially similar” standard and the stablecoin carve-out descriptors, as well as any downstream guidance from regulators. The longer-term uncertainty is how these constraints interact with future legislative efforts in U.S. crypto market structure—areas where Congress is still debating rules for trading, custody, and market conduct.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act on Tuesday, sending the bill to President Donald Trump for final approval. 

The measure passed the House by a 358-32 vote after the Senate cleared it 85-5 one day earlier.

The bill focuses on housing affordability, supply and access to homeownership. It seeks to cut red tape, speed up construction, limit large investor control in parts of the housing market and update some federal housing programs.

“Today, Congress delivered a major win for families working toward the American Dream,” said Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott. “The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will help more Americans put down roots, build a better future, and find not just a house, but a home, and I look forward to President Trump signing it into law.”

CBDC ban moves with the package

The housing bill also includes language blocking the Federal Reserve from issuing or creating a central bank digital currency. The restriction would run until Dec. 31, 2030, unless Congress acts again before that date.

The clause bars the Federal Reserve Board or any Federal Reserve bank from issuing a CBDC or a digital asset that is substantially similar to one. It also applies to issuance through a financial institution or other intermediary.

The bill defines a CBDC as a dollar-denominated digital asset that counts as U.S. currency, is a direct liability of the Federal Reserve System and is widely available to the public. The language includes an exception for dollar-denominated digital currency that is open, permissionless and private.

Trump policy backs CBDC freeze

The CBDC clause fits the Trump administration’s position on a federal digital dollar. President Trump signed an executive order in January 2025 that barred federal agencies from taking steps to establish, issue or promote a CBDC unless required by law.

As previously reported by crypto.news, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a U.S. CBDC was “off the table” under Trump. Bessent also urged lawmakers to move ahead with the CLARITY Act as part of a broader push to bring digital asset activity into the United States.

In a recent update, crypto.news covered the Senate vote that moved the housing bill and CBDC ban toward the House. That report noted that the Fed had not launched a digital dollar program and that the idea had remained closer to research than rollout.

Private stablecoins remain outside the freeze

The CBDC language does not ban private stablecoins. The bill’s carveout keeps the restriction focused on Federal Reserve-issued money, not privately issued dollar tokens that meet the bill’s conditions.

Previously, crypto.news reported that the housing deal included a stablecoin carveout while blocking a Fed digital dollar until 2030. That language matters as Congress continues to work on separate digital asset rules covering stablecoins and market structure.

The U.S. stance also differs from other markets. The European Central Bank has continued work on a digital euro, while China has developed the digital yuan. The United States is now moving toward a legal pause on a retail Fed digital dollar through the end of 2030.

If Trump signs the bill, the CBDC restriction will move from executive policy into federal law. The broader package will also place housing reform and digital dollar limits inside the same statute, linking two policy debates that Congress handled through one bill.

Maryland State Delegate Adrian Boafo has won the Democratic primary for Maryland’s 5th Congressional District, putting him on track to compete for the seat held by retiring Rep. Steny Hoyer. 

The Associated Press and Decision Desk HQ called the race Tuesday night after a crowded primary with more than 20 Democratic candidates.