- Robinhood is plugging OG.com’s CFTC-regulated event contracts directly into its prediction markets hub
- Robinhood is taking minority stakes in Crypto.com and OG.com at the valuations Citadel set in July
- Prediction markets now bring Robinhood more revenue than its core crypto trading
- The first contracts routed to OG.com cover football, timed to the NFL season and the November midterms
Robinhood Markets told investors on September 8 that it will feed yes-or-no event contracts from OG.com, the prediction-markets exchange Crypto.com recently carved out as a separate company, directly into its trading app, and that it is buying minority equity in both businesses under a multi-year agreement. The deal hands Robinhood something it could not build on its own quickly: a derivatives exchange and clearinghouse that already carries registration with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. For Crypto.com, it opens a distribution channel into one of the largest retail brokerages in the country. The timing is deliberate, with the professional football season underway and the November midterm elections a few weeks out.
The clearinghouse is the part Robinhood couldn’t build itself
OG.com runs as a standalone platform that pairs a derivatives exchange with its own clearinghouse, and both sit under CFTC oversight. That second piece is what Robinhood is really buying access to. A clearinghouse stands between the two sides of every trade and guarantees that the winner gets paid even if the loser walks away, which is the part of a regulated derivatives market that takes years and heavy compliance work to stand up. Robinhood supplies the customers and the interface. OG.com matches the contracts and settles them. Splitting the stack this way lets Robinhood scale event-contract volume without carrying the full regulatory weight of an exchange on its own balance sheet.
Robinhood anchored its stake to a valuation only weeks old
Robinhood said the equity purchases are priced in line with the funding rounds Citadel Securities led in July 2026, which put Crypto.com at $20 billion and OG.com at $5 billion. That reference point matters because it is recent and it came from an outside institution rather than from the two parties negotiating in a vacuum. Citadel Securities placed $400 million into Crypto.com in July, its first large traditional-finance backer, and that check effectively set the market price both companies are now leaning on. By anchoring the stake to an arm’s-length round only weeks old, Robinhood sidesteps the usual argument over what a private crypto exchange is worth. The cash size of Robinhood’s stake stays private for now.
$156 million in one quarter pushed event contracts past crypto
The strategic logic shows up in Robinhood’s own numbers. Prediction markets generated $156 million in the second quarter of 2026, more than ten times the figure a year earlier, and that line has now overtaken the revenue Robinhood pulls from ordinary crypto transactions. Retail traders ran 13.6 billion contracts through the platform in the quarter. The shift lands at a useful moment, because Robinhood recorded a 33% drop in retail spot crypto trading volume in July, and event contracts give the company a revenue stream that does not move in lockstep with token prices.
Analysts at Bernstein have put a figure on where this could go, projecting that Robinhood’s prediction-markets revenue on its own could reach $1.7 billion by 2028, a 64% compound annual growth rate. The same July note lifted Bernstein’s price target on the stock to $160 from $130 and named tokenized equities as a separate long-term driver. That $1.7 billion is a projection rather than a reported result, so it belongs in the forecast column and not the balance sheet.
Four venues now, after starting with just Kalshi
The Crypto.com tie-up fits a pattern Robinhood has followed all year. It opened its prediction markets hub through Kalshi in early 2025, then added Interactive Brokers’ ForecastEx, and launched Rothera, its own exchange, in mid-2026, a derivatives exchange joint venture with Susquehanna International Group. OG.com becomes the newest route rather than the only one. Spreading contracts across several venues gives Robinhood pricing leverage and protects it if any one partner hits a regulatory wall.
The competition for the same volume is widening. Meta has reportedly assigned an internal team to build a native prediction markets product, and the sportsbook operators FanDuel and DraftKings have launched their own event-contract lines. Crypto.com had already moved to supply that side of the market, striking a deal in June 2026 to power the backend of FanDuel Predicts. Sector-wide, aggregate prediction-market volume across venues such as Kalshi and Polymarket reached $50 billion in 2025 and has passed $130 billion so far in 2026.
Equity, not a contract, ties Robinhood to Crypto.com’s IPO
Holding equity, rather than signing a plain routing contract, ties Robinhood’s outcome to Crypto.com’s next corporate move. Crypto.com has finished the restructuring that separated OG.com and says the work was done to prepare for an initial public offering, though it has not set public-market timing. A stake bought at a private valuation gains a clear mark the day that listing prices. The two companies also say they are co-developing equity-linked perpetual futures, a product that would let retail traders take leveraged positions on stock movements, but Crypto.com chief executive Kris Marszalek framed that work as pending regulatory approval, which leaves it outside anything customers can trade today. Away from the Robinhood deal, Crypto.com has been pushing its payment rails into travel, adding Crypto.com Pay as a checkout option for Emirates flights and at Dubai Duty Free, a sign that the prediction-markets partnership is one lane in a broader effort to place the company inside mainstream consumer spending.
