Bernstein raises Robinhood revenue forecast on strong crypto contracts

Gautam Chhugani put a number on paper at the start of this week: Robinhood generates more from prediction markets than from cryptocurrency trading by 2028, and not narrowly. His forecast has event contract revenue at $1.7 billion against $1.6 billion in crypto — a reversal that, two years ago, would have read as a typographical error.

The crossing already happened once. In the second quarter of this year, event contracts beat crypto on a quarterly basis for the first time. Chhugani is not projecting a disruption; he is projecting that a disruption already underway does not reverse. That is a different and weaker claim than it sounds, and the market should be pricing it that way.

Here is where I part from the consensus framing. The reporting treats this as a growth story about prediction markets. I read it as a concentration story about Robinhood specifically, and the distinction matters for how you price the forward.

Robinhood's event contract business is scaling inside a legal environment that is still unresolved. The CFTC preemption argument — whether federal jurisdiction blocks state enforcement — has survived one circuit challenge and is heading toward a Supreme Court posture that nobody can call with confidence. Kalshi is in active litigation with Utah and New York simultaneously. The NBA deal this week clarified that major sports leagues are willing to work within a federal framework, but the NFL's brief in the New Jersey case is still live, and the NFL is not a small amicus. A $1.7 billion revenue line in 2028 requires the legal architecture to hold. Chhugani's model presumably assumes it does. That assumption is doing more work than the report acknowledges.

The Coinbase number is the one I find harder to dismiss. An estimated $600 million this year rising to $2 billion in 2028 is a threefold move, driven partly by event contracts and partly by perpetual futures — instruments that already have a large, established user base in crypto. Coinbase is not building a new customer relationship to sell these products. It is adding a product line to people who already hold accounts, already understand leverage, and already tolerate the kind of outcome variance that makes prediction markets feel familiar. That distribution advantage is structural in a way that Bernstein's headline number does not fully capture.

The Robinhood story and the Coinbase story are running in parallel but they are not the same bet. Robinhood is converting a retail trading base that came for stocks and crypto into prediction market participants — a behavior shift. Coinbase is extending an existing product logic to an adjacent instrument — a product extension. Behavior shifts are harder to model and slower to compound than product extensions. If I had to take a position on which of the two estimates ages better, I would take the Coinbase number over the Robinhood number, not because $1.7 billion is wrong in direction, but because the path to it requires more things to go right that are outside Robinhood's control.