Robinhood says traders are pushing its prediction-market business away from its obvious gateway drug. Sports remains the platform’s largest event-contract category, but the fastest growth is now in contracts tied to bitcoin, crude oil and gold, according to JB Mackenzie, the company’s vice president and general manager for futures and prediction markets, speaking at the NEXTPredict conference in New York.
That matters because it says something more useful than the usual crypto-volume chest-thumping. Robinhood is not describing customers buying the underlying assets. It is describing demand for short-dated contracts on whether a price level or event will hit by a set time. That is a different habit: less ownership, more wagering on direction and timing.
Mackenzie said Robinhood’s largest single event contract in September was linked not to sports but to the Federal Reserve’s rate decision. In plain English, customers appear increasingly willing to trade macro headlines and commodity moves the way they trade a match result. Markets have a talent for turning anything with a timestamp into a product.
The shorter the contract, the clearer the appeal and the uglier the risk. Mackenzie said some crypto contracts now settle in as little as 15 minutes, down from a week and then a day. He compared them with zero-day options, which also offer a rapid path from excitement to losses. The comparison is directionally fair, even if the structures are different. Either way, the useful denominator is time: compress the holding period hard enough and the line between “market access” and impulse control gets blurry.
There is also a business reason Robinhood is leaning in. Mackenzie said users who arrive for event contracts often move into stocks, crypto, futures and options, and some find the company’s retirement accounts as well. That makes prediction markets less a stand-alone novelty than a customer-acquisition funnel with better entertainment value than a cash ISA.
One claim deserves restraint. Mackenzie said Robinhood has 11 businesses generating more than $100 million in annual revenue each, and that prediction markets could be the fastest-growing among them. “Could” is doing real work there. Robinhood did not, in the published remarks, give revenue for event contracts or disclose what share comes from sports, finance or crypto-linked products. Growth without a base can flatter almost anything.
Still, the shift itself is revealing. If traders are moving from sports to 15-minute bitcoin and Fed contracts, Robinhood has found a market where finance is not replacing gambling so much as borrowing its tempo.
Isla Camilleri 
Alex de Valletta