Bitcoin, gold contracts are Robinhood's fastest-growing prediction markets

Robinhood's prediction-market operation is rotating away from sports and toward financial price action, and the executive running it just laid out how far the shift has gone. JB Mackenzie, the brokerage's vice president and general manager for futures and prediction markets, told Thursday's NEXTPredict gathering in New York that price-volatility contracts on bitcoin, crude oil and gold now rank among the platform's fastest-expanding products. Sports betting still generates the most volume, he said, but the momentum sits with financial contracts. The detail that landed hardest: September's biggest single event contract followed the Federal Reserve's rate decision, not any game.

The speed of the shift shows in settlement times. Crypto contracts on the platform began with weekly expiries, moved to daily, and now settle within roughly a quarter-hour. Mackenzie compared the 15-minute contracts to same-day expiring options, warning that both can inflict fast losses despite different structures. The financial-contract push lands as sports betting faces legal pressure from state gambling regulators, which has raised doubts about how much of that business remains available. Robinhood lists the contracts through Kalshi, the CFTC-registered derivatives venue, after entering the business via a partnership with the exchange. The cross-sell dynamic is the real prize: Mackenzie said users who arrive to trade event contracts almost immediately begin exploring stocks, crypto, futures, options and retirement accounts. The company now runs 11 business lines each clearing $100 million in annual revenue, and prediction markets could become the fastest-growing of them.

The revenue line validates the pivot. Event-contract revenue jumped more than tenfold from a year earlier to $156 million in Q2 2026 — now larger than Robinhood's equity and crypto trading revenues — on a record 13.6 billion contracts, per Zacks research.

Robinhood's move tracks a wider boom. DeFi Rate data puts 30-day prediction-market contract face value at $107.5 billion, with $26.6 billion changing hands in cash, and Kalshi at 76% of tracked volume after a 53% jump from the previous stretch. The October 17-18 weekend alone cleared $11 billion combined, a first for any two-day period in the industry. Yet the expansion collides with a spreading legal battle: Ohio's casino regulator told ten platforms, Robinhood Derivatives included, to halt sports contracts for Ohioans by October 16, following a September 25 Sixth Circuit decision allowing the state to enforce gambling law. Most kept operating anyway, and Ohio's governor is threatening lawsuits. That backdrop is exactly why the rotation into financial contracts — bitcoin price wagers instead of game results — reads as strategy rather than experiment.

Why it matters

For crypto traders, the signal is demand, not price. A regulated venue selling 15-minute bitcoin contracts turns intraday volatility into a mainstream retail product — and Robinhood calls those its quickest-growing products, with bitcoin at $81,437 in MarketRadar's live snapshot today and gold at $3,995.2. The cross-sell story is the deeper one: event contracts are drawing users into the brokerage's core products, from equities to crypto, which is why management frames the segment as potentially the fastest-growing of eleven $100M-plus businesses. The Ohio dispute shows the other side: if more states copy the playbook, the addressable market shrinks and the growth story stalls. For the wider compliance squeeze on exchanges, see Coinbase's €3.25M Irish fine.