Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev predicts crypto will dominate prediction markets
Crypto event contracts are already outpacing sports bets on Robinhood's platform, with Tenev forecasting they'll become the dominant category within years
Robinhood’s prediction markets business started as an election-season experiment in 2024. Two years later, it’s generating hundreds of millions in revenue, and CEO Vlad Tenev says the fastest-growing slice of the pie isn’t sports. It’s crypto.
Speaking on CNBC’s Mad Money on September 20, Tenev said crypto event contracts are capturing a disproportionate share of trading activity on the platform, and he expects sports betting to become a minority category in Robinhood’s prediction markets business within a few years.
The numbers behind the shift
Robinhood traded 13.6 billion event contracts in Q2 2026, pulling in roughly $156 million in revenue from that segment alone. Prediction markets have at times generated more money for Robinhood than its actual crypto trading business.
A hefty chunk of that Q2 volume, about 5 billion contracts, was tied to the World Cup. But even with a global tournament juicing the sports side, crypto-linked contracts still managed to grab a larger share of overall activity.
The first eight months of 2026 have been record-setting for Robinhood’s prediction markets in terms of trading activity.
Building the infrastructure to match the ambition
Rothera, a joint venture between Robinhood and trading giant Susquehanna, owns approximately 90% of MIAXdx, formerly known as LedgerX. That exchange provides the regulated infrastructure underpinning Robinhood’s prediction market contracts.
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On September 8, Robinhood announced it had taken minority equity stakes in both Crypto.com and OG.com, a deal valued at $5 billion following a Citadel Securities investment.
Why crypto events are eating sports
Sports events are seasonal and bounded. The World Cup happens once every four years. The NFL season runs September through February. March Madness lasts three weeks. Between tentpole events, sports contract volumes naturally dip.
Crypto markets, on the other hand, never sleep. There’s always a protocol upgrade, a regulatory decision, a token launch, or a market milestone to trade around. The surface area for creating event contracts is essentially infinite, and the audience for those contracts overlaps perfectly with Robinhood’s existing user base of digitally native retail traders.
What this means for the broader market
For competitors like Kalshi, Polymarket, and other prediction market platforms, Robinhood’s aggressive expansion poses a serious challenge. Robinhood brings tens of millions of existing brokerage accounts, regulatory relationships across all 50 states, and the kind of brand recognition that crypto-native platforms spend years trying to build.
Robinhood’s ownership stake in MIAXdx gives it a CFTC-regulated exchange to point to whenever regulatory questions arise, a deliberate strategic choice that could prove to be the most important investment the company has made in this cycle.