Robinhood: bitcoin, gold, oil bets lead prediction growth

Price contracts on bitcoin, gold and crude oil are now the fastest-growing products in Robinhood's prediction markets, even though sports is still the biggest category, JB Mackenzie, the company's vice president and general manager for futures and prediction markets, said at the NEXTPredict conference in New York on Thursday, CoinDesk reported.

What Robinhood said

• Shift in demand: price-volatility contracts on bitcoin, crude oil and gold "start to dominate the marketplace", Mackenzie said.
• Biggest single contract in September: the Federal Reserve's interest-rate decision, not a sports event.
• Shorter timeframes: crypto contracts went from a week to a day and now to 15 minutes. Mackenzie compared the 15-minute versions to zero-day options, which expire the same day.
• Funnel effect: users who arrive for event contracts quickly move into stocks, crypto, futures, options and even retirement accounts, he said. Robinhood has 11 businesses each earning more than $100 million a year, and prediction markets could become the fastest-growing of them.

Robinhood offers the contracts through a partnership with Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated exchange.

Our take

The rebranding is the story. Sports contracts face lawsuits from state gambling regulators, so moving volume toward markets on prices and economic data gives platforms a business that looks more like finance and less like a sportsbook. That is a sensible hedge for Robinhood. It does not change what a short crypto contract is: a yes-or-no bet on where a volatile asset will be in a few minutes. Bitcoin swings roughly as much as Nvidia stock, as we noted in today's volatility comparison, and 15-minute windows mostly capture noise.

The honest framing is Mackenzie's own: these behave like zero-day options, which can wipe out a stake fast. For how contract prices translate into probabilities and where the legal fault lines sit, read our explainer what are prediction markets. The same race to put crypto users in front of Kalshi's catalogue is visible in Phantom's rollout today.