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Discussed in this piece:

1) How Robinhood got into prediction markets

2) Vlad Tenev's case for why this becomes a trillion-dollar business

3) Rothera: the joint venture with Susquehanna that lets Robinhood own the stack

4) The June numbers, and what the World Cup is doing to them

This piece was written and researched by Pet Berisha and Omar El Safy

Robinhood entered prediction markets in October 2024 with a single, well-timed market: who wins the US presidential election.

The contracts ran through Robinhood Derivatives, its CFTC-registered entity, and more than 500 million election contracts traded in the first week.

Then, they hit a hurdle. In February 2025, Robinhood listed Super Bowl event contracts through a new tie-up with Kalshi, and within days pulled them at the request of the CFTC, which was mid-fight with Kalshi over whether sports event contracts were legal at all. Robinhood's line at the time was diplomatic: it had been "in close contact with the CFTC" and wanted "to promote innovation."

Just a month later, On 17 March 2025, Robinhood launched a dedicated prediction markets hub, powered by Kalshi, listing event contracts across sport, economics and politics. 

CEO of Robinhood Vlad Tenev, thinks prediction markets will become one of the largest businesses Robinhood has ever run.

And he has not been subtle about it. On the 2025 Q3 earnings call, Tenev called event contracts the company's biggest product launch of the year and its fastest-growing product in company history. He backed it with numbers:

"We've traded more contracts, at about 2.5 billion [in October], than all of Q3 put together. So that's been ramping extremely quickly."

By his account, the business was tracking toward roughly $300 million in annual revenue off October's run-rate, double the prior quarter. In September 2025, he posted that Robinhood Prediction Markets had crossed 4 billion event contracts all-time, with over 2 billion in a single quarter, and added the line he keeps returning to: "we're just getting started."

The vision he pitches is bigger than sports betting in a brokerage wrapper.

Tenev frames prediction markets as a new asset class and an eventual source of truth, a real-time, money-weighted read on what the world expects to happen, which he argues could reach "trillions" in annual volume. He told CNBC, plainly, that prediction markets "will change the world for the better."

The Kalshi partnership had one flaw for Robinhood. They did not own the exchange, and therefore none of the underlying economics. 

Under the distribution deal, Robinhood reportedly kept only 30–50% of the fee pool on contracts its own customers traded. It supplied the demand and handed up to half the economics to the venue. At nine billion contracts and roughly $300m of annualised revenue, that wasn't going to last for long.

So Robinhood stopped renting. 

In November 2025 it formed a joint venture with Susquehanna International Group (SIG), the options market-making giant, and one of the earliest institutional liquidity providers to Kalshi, to take control of a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange. 

That exchange is Rothera: Robinhood's own Designated Contract Market (DCM), run with SIG, carrying the licence, the listing, the clearing and the risk management it used to rent from Kalshi.

In our prediction market 2025 report, we highlighted that a key layer in prediction markets would be the clearinghouse.

What we didn’t anticipate was how fast Robinhood would move up‑stack after its success routing flow through Kalshi.

The way Rothera was formed is pretty interesting, as journeys go. 

MIAX first bought LedgerX out of the FTX mess and rebranded it as MIAXdx, keeping its role as a CFTC‑regulated exchange and clearinghouse.

Robinhood and Susquehanna (market maker) then agreed to buy 90% of MIAXdx (formerly LedgerX) to use its existing CFTC‑licensed exchange and clearing infrastructure as the foundation for their futures, derivatives and prediction‑market exchange, with MIAX retaining the remaining 10%.

In January 2026  MIAXdx changed its legal name in CFTC records to Rothera Exchange and Clearing LLC, formalising the move to the Rothera stack controlled by the Robinhood–Susquehanna JV.

Owning the venue lets Robinhood capture more of the economics, which some speculate could roughly double revenue per contract while offsetting the same income in Kalshi's books.

Rothera has exploded this summer, for the World Cup.

Rothera went from nothing to 20x in 15 days. Daily volume on its own book ran from 6 million contracts on 8 June to a 142 million peak on 19 June and has held above 100 million every day since. 

Open interest followed the same line, 7.5 million to 126 million over 18 days. This has been largely pulled up by one event.

That event is the World Cup. 

Of the 126 million contracts on Rothera's own book on 23 June, 97% were World Cup markets. Within those, 65% were single-match winners and 12% over/under goals.

Cumulatively since launch, Rothera's single biggest market is the World Cup Winner outright at 92.1 million contracts, almost double the next-biggest single match, Germany v Ivory Coast at 49.2M.

Estimated dollar volume on Rothera ran from $2 million on 8 June to $43 million on 23 June. Against 125 million contracts the same day, that puts the average contract at around 34 cents, which is what a book full of cheap, longshot World Cup bets produces. Kalshi's combo data showed the same shape, huge notional and thin handle.

What To Watch

1. 19 July. The World Cup final is the cliff edge. 97% of Rothera's volume is one tournament. Kalshi's combo handle kept climbing after the NFL ended; Rothera needs the same trick, or the charts roll over in late July.

2. Dollars, not contracts. $43 million in dollar volume on 23 June at Robinhood's scale is a rounding error. The contract counts make great screenshots. The revenue case rests on handling and fees, and those are still small.

3. The Kalshi divorce. Robinhood still routes a slice of flow through Kalshi while Rothera ramps. Watch the green bars (Rothera) eat the blue (Kalshi-routed) on the daily-volume chart above.

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