Robinhood CEO bets crypto contracts will overtake sports within years

Vlad Tenev made the prediction on CNBC's Mad Money, and it was specific enough to price: within a few years, sports contracts will be a minority of Robinhood's prediction markets business, overtaken by crypto-linked event contracts that are already, in his words, "taking a disproportionate share."

The claim landed alongside numbers that make it harder to dismiss than most CEO forecasts. Event-contract revenue at Robinhood reached $156 million in the second quarter of 2026, more than ten times the figure from a year earlier. Contracts traded 4.7 billion times in August alone. The company's prediction markets operation is now its fastest-growing line, which is a striking sentence given that Robinhood built its identity on equities and crypto. Crypto trading revenue, for its part, actually fell in the same period.

Tenev's architecture is worth understanding because it tells you something about the bet underneath the bet. Robinhood runs its event contracts through three separate pipelines: Kalshi, the exchange that won its regulatory fight with the CFTC to offer election markets; Rothera, its own CFTC-licensed joint venture with Susquehanna, tested during the World Cup; and now OG.com, the prediction-market spinoff of Crypto.com, in which Robinhood has taken a minority stake. That is not a company dabbling. That is a company building infrastructure it intends to own for a decade.

The sports-as-wedge framing is the part I find genuinely interesting, and the part the market may be underweighting. Tenev said sports "brought people in, got liquidity, established" the business — past tense, essentially. If he is right that crypto contracts are already crowding out sports in volume terms, the current regulatory exposure concentrated around sports markets matters less to Robinhood's forward revenue than the state attorneys general filing cease-and-desist orders may assume. Missouri can target sports contracts. It cannot easily target a contract settling on a Federal Reserve decision or a Bitcoin price level, and those are precisely the products Tenev is steering toward.

I have watched institutional money move into prediction markets slowly and then abruptly before, and the Robinhood numbers suggest the abrupt phase is now. The $156 million quarter is real. The tenfold growth is real. Whether crypto contracts sustain that trajectory without the novelty premium that sports betting carried in its own early phase is where I would push back — the base effect from here is brutal, and Tenev is forecasting a ratio shift inside a market that is itself still finding its regulatory floor.

Still, the structural argument holds. Sports contracts are a distribution channel. Crypto and macro contracts, if they develop sufficient liquidity, are the product. Tenev has been consistent about this for long enough that it reads as conviction rather than positioning for an earnings call.