Robinhood earns more from prediction markets than stock trading

Robinhood’s prediction markets business just crossed a milestone that would have sounded absurd two years ago. In Q2 2026, the company’s event contracts segment pulled in $156 million in transaction revenue, topping both stock trading at $129 million and crypto trading at $100 million.

That makes prediction markets the second-largest revenue driver on the entire platform, trailing only options trading at $342 million. For a product line that didn’t exist before 2024, that’s a remarkable ascent.

The numbers behind the crossover

Robinhood’s Q2 2026 earnings paint a picture of a company rapidly reshaping its revenue mix. Total net revenue hit a record $1.31 billion, up 32% from the prior year. Net income came in at $573 million.

The event contracts business grew roughly 50% from Q1 alone, and more than tenfold year-over-year. The platform processed 13.6 billion contracts during the quarter, a 55% jump from the previous three months.

Much of that volume was driven by FIFA World Cup markets. Meanwhile, crypto trading revenue dropped to $100 million, a 38% decline year-over-year.

Nearly two million users have now traded event contracts on the platform.

How Robinhood built a prediction markets machine

The foundation for this moment was laid in 2024, when Robinhood launched CFTC-regulated event contracts tied to the US presidential election. In March 2025, the company rolled out a dedicated prediction markets hub, centralizing the product and making it easier for users to discover and trade contracts across categories. But the real inflection point came with the launch of Rothera, a joint venture exchange built in partnership with Susquehanna International Group.

Rothera went live in late May or early June 2026 and processed more than 3.5 billion contracts in its initial run. The exchange gave Robinhood something critical: infrastructure it controlled. Rather than routing orders through third-party platforms and splitting the economics, Robinhood could now operate its own matching engine, retain more of the transaction revenue, and scale without being dependent on external partners.

What this means for Robinhood’s future

Bernstein analysts project that prediction market revenue could grow at a 64% compound annual growth rate, potentially reaching around $1.7 billion by 2028.

The crypto revenue decline is notable in context. At $100 million, it now represents a smaller share of the overall mix than at any point in recent memory.

For competitors like Kalshi and Polymarket, Robinhood’s scale presents a challenge. Kalshi has been the most prominent CFTC-regulated prediction market, but it doesn’t have Robinhood’s distribution advantage: millions of existing brokerage accounts, a mobile app with massive install base, and now a proprietary exchange backend. Polymarket operates in the crypto-native space using blockchain-based settlement. Robinhood’s event contracts don’t touch crypto rails at all.

Investors watching HOOD will likely focus on whether the Q2 numbers represent a World Cup-driven peak or a sustainable baseline, as major global events create volume surges that don’t repeat every quarter.

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