Robinhood Turns From Sports Betting to Crypto Prediction Markets

WASHINGTON — Robinhood Markets Inc. is redirecting its rapidly expanding prediction-markets business from sports-themed contracts toward digital assets, treating cryptocurrency as a safer regulatory alternative to the legally contested world of sports gambling.

Robinhood Chief Executive Officer Vlad Tenev said on CNBC’s Mad Money that sports contracts initially served as a “wedge” for bringing liquidity and engagement to the platform. He told host Jim Cramer that “sports will actually be in the minority” within a few years as financial and macroeconomic contracts become more prominent.

The company’s event-contract revenue rose more than tenfold year-over-year to $156 million in the second quarter of 2026. Trading reached a record 4.7 billion contracts in August, a 15-fold increase from the same period last year, even as Robinhood’s traditional cryptocurrency trading revenue temporarily softened.

Robinhood first launched its prediction offering using Kalshi’s market infrastructure. It later added Rothera, a joint venture licensed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and operated with quantitative trading giant Susquehanna. This month, Robinhood took minority equity stakes in Crypto.com and its dedicated prediction-market spin-off, OG.com, giving it a third major partner for processing and settling transactions.

The company’s move toward cryptocurrency and macroeconomic event contracts comes as sports products face conflicting legal challenges. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Nevada could regulate Kalshi’s sports contracts, creating a jurisdictional split with an earlier Third Circuit ruling.

New Jersey has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve the dispute. States contend that sports-themed event contracts are a proxy for unregulated sports gambling, while cryptocurrency and macroeconomic contracts do not carry the same legal liabilities.

Tenev pointed to Robinhood’s contract tracking the legislative progress of the Clarity Act as an example of the markets’ utility and real-time accuracy. The digital asset regulatory bill ultimately failed to clear a crucial cloture vote last week, but prediction markets anticipated the defeat hours before the official roll call. On the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket, the odds of passage fell from 35% to 11% before the Senate vote.

Prediction-market volume has increased alongside a volatile resurgence in cryptocurrency, renewing retail investor interest after an extended period of stagnant price action. Bitcoin recently reached an eight-month high of approximately $86,000.

Once Bitcoin moved above $82,000, the rally triggered a short squeeze that liquidated roughly $750 million in short positions. Traders subsequently added an estimated $2 billion in new leverage, while technical analysts increasingly watched the $90,000 threshold.

Institutional flows also increased. Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded $999 million in daily net inflows, their largest single-day influx since October 2026. During a later Friday session, spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted $433 million, Ethereum ETFs received $143 million, and Solana ETFs drew $48 million.

Corporate treasuries expanded as well. Enterprise software company Strategy bought another 950 BTC for $75.7 million at an average price of $79,670 per coin, lifting its total treasury holdings to 846,000 BTC. The company also spent $174 million repurchasing STRC shares.

Digital asset manager Bitmine added 27,562 ETH, bringing its corporate treasury to 5.98 million ETH, or more than 4.9% of the entire circulating Ethereum supply.

Taylor Lindman, Chief Counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force, said the first tokenized stock trading venues could file formal regulatory notices as early as next quarter. Several prominent financial firms have already submitted inquiries about a newly established SEC exemption for blockchain-based equity settlements.

Coinbase has opened initial public offering allocations to U.S.-based retail customers. The program begins with this week’s Nasdaq listing of health-technology developer Oura, which is offering 50 million shares at a targeted price range of $40 to $44.

Coinbase will bar any retail participant who sells allocated shares within 30 days of the debut from joining subsequent offerings for the next 60 days. Meanwhile, X, formerly Twitter, released a promotional video for its upcoming “Cashtag Program,” which will let users trade designated stocks and cryptocurrency tokens from their timelines through secure API connections to centralized exchanges.

Apple is seeking a U.S.-based Pay Strategy Lead with experience in stablecoins and tokenized deposit structures. Google Cloud has posted an opening for a Web3 Architect in Hong Kong. Neither company has formally announced a dedicated commercial blockchain product.

Political action committee Fairshake said it will spend $30 million opposing incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, in the upcoming Ohio Senate race. The planned spending follows the Clarity Act’s legislative failure and comes after the PAC spent approximately $40 million in 2024 seeking to unseat Brown, the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and a prominent skeptic of digital assets.

In the United Kingdom, X sued two British citizens in London’s High Court, alleging that they ran a coordinated network of six automated Bitcoin bot accounts. X claims the network extracted at least £207,384, approximately $278,000, from its creator payout program before the loophole was closed.

Blockchain security firm SlowMist and Ledger Chief Technology Officer Charles Guillemet issued an urgent joint advisory about an active mobile exploit chain called “DarkSword.” Attackers are using compromised Safari webpages to execute zero-day vulnerabilities on Apple iOS devices and remotely access and extract software-wallet seed phrases and private keys.

Cybersecurity officials are urging mobile-wallet users to update their devices to iOS version 26.3 or later immediately to mitigate the threat.