Robinhood Becomes Fastest-Growing Prediction Market With 12B+ Contracts in 2025
Robinhood processed over 12 billion event contracts in 2025 and acquired MIAXdx to build its own CFTC-licensed exchange, positioning it to compete directly with Kalshi and ForecastEx.
Robinhood's prediction markets hub, launched in March 2025, became the fastest-growing retail entry point to event-contract trading in the United States within its first year. The company disclosed that more than 12 billion contracts were traded on the platform in 2025 and that over one million users actively trade prediction markets. That adoption curve reflects both Robinhood's existing 26-million-strong user base and the ease of adding event contracts to a platform already used for stocks, ETFs, and crypto.
In January 2026, Robinhood acquired MIAXdx, a CFTC-licensed designated contract market (DCM). The acquisition signals that Robinhood intends to operate its own prediction market exchange rather than relying indefinitely on ForecastEx (political and economic contracts) and Kalshi (sports contracts). Analysts expect Robinhood's own exchange to go live in mid-2026, potentially offering a full suite of event contracts (sports, politics, economics, and potentially weather) from a single in-house licensed venue.
The sports contract expansion accelerated in December 2025 when Robinhood added NFL parlay and prop bet-style event contracts via its Kalshi integration, ahead of the NFL playoffs. Sports contracts are currently available in 35+ US states including the major markets of California, Texas, and Florida.
Robinhood's fee structure ($0.02/contract: $0.01 Robinhood + $0.01 exchange fee) is competitive against traditional sportsbooks but slightly more expensive than Novig's commission-free model or Kalshi's profit-only-fee structure for losing trades. With its own DCM, Robinhood could restructure its pricing to remain the most consumer-friendly option in the embedded brokerage segment.
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Kalshi's Parlays Drive Back-to-Back $5B Days — and Hand Critics Their Strongest Argument
Kalshi traded a record $5.33 billion on November 7 and $5.36 billion on November 8, with multi-leg parlay-style 'combos' making up roughly 75% of both days' volume. Its 30-day volume topped $100 billion. But the parlay dominance cuts against the platform's legal defense: parlays are a quintessential sportsbook product, and the American Gaming Association has told the Second Circuit that parlays make up about two-thirds of Kalshi's volume and should be treated as sports bets. The implied house edge on 10-plus-leg combos is around 25%, undercutting the argument that these are neutral financial instruments rather than gambling.
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