Robinhood prediction market revenue forecast tops crypto by 2028

Bernstein analyst Gautam Chhugani put a number on it at the start of this week: $1.7 billion in prediction market revenue for Robinhood by 2028, edging past the $1.6 billion he projects from cryptocurrency trading in the same year. The figure matters less as a forecast than as a signal about where Bernstein thinks the center of gravity in retail finance is moving.

The number for this year is $650 million. Doubling that in two years is the kind of growth curve that looks obvious in retrospect and aggressive in the present tense. I have seen analysts make this mistake in both directions — undershooting a structural shift because the existing revenue line looks stable, overshooting because the addressable market calculation ignores the cost of acquiring the next customer. Chhugani's track record on this sector is his to defend. What the projection does is establish a public benchmark that Robinhood's management will now have to address every quarter.

In the second quarter, prediction market revenue exceeded cryptocurrency revenue for Robinhood on a quarterly basis for the first time. That crossover happened faster than most of the sell-side anticipated. The third-quarter earnings release, due after US markets close today, will show whether that was a durable shift or a single quarter shaped by event-heavy months.

The more interesting projection is Coinbase. Chhugani sees event contracts and derivatives generating $2 billion for Coinbase by 2028, up from an estimated $600 million this year. That is a larger absolute number than his Robinhood call, and it rests on a different premise: Coinbase's path runs through derivatives including perpetual futures, not just the binary event contracts that have driven Robinhood's volumes. Perpetuals do not expire. They generate ongoing fee revenue. If that category scales, the revenue model looks less like a sportsbook and more like a futures exchange, which commands a different valuation multiple.

The consensus read on these projections will be that prediction markets are simply the next product cycle for retail platforms — crypto's successor as the high-engagement, high-margin category. I think that framing misses something. Prediction markets and cryptocurrency are not substitutes; they are correlated risk appetites. When retail sentiment turns, both categories move together. The platforms building revenue diversification stories on top of two products that share the same customer psychology are not as diversified as the revenue split implies.