Meta description: Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev says crypto event contracts are gaining share as Robinhood adds OG.com and reports $156 million in Q2 revenue.
Tags: Robinhood, Crypto.com, OG.com, Kalshi, CFTC, Vlad Tenev
market_platform: none-if-cross-platform
category: Industry
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said September 18 on CNBC’s “Mad Money” that crypto-linked event contracts are taking a larger share of Robinhood’s prediction-market activity and could leave sports contracts in the minority within a few years. The comments followed Robinhood’s July 29 report of $156 million in second-quarter event-contract revenue and its September 8 announcement that it would route selected football contracts through Crypto.com and OG.com.
What did Tenev say about crypto event contracts?
Tenev told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that Robinhood is seeing categories outside sports, including crypto, take a disproportionate share of prediction-market activity. He also argued that event contracts should be treated as financial instruments rather than as a renamed version of sports betting, a framing that sits at the center of the industry’s state and federal legal fights.
Robinhood’s second-quarter numbers explain why the company is talking about the category in broader financial-market terms. In its July 29 earnings release for the quarter ended June 30, Robinhood reported total net revenue of $1.31 billion, up 32% year over year. Transaction-based revenue rose 44% to $776 million, led in part by $156 million of event-contract revenue, which the company said was up more than tenfold from the prior year.
Event-contract revenue also exceeded Robinhood’s $100 million in cryptocurrency transaction revenue for the quarter, according to the same earnings release. Robinhood reported 13.6 billion event contracts traded in Q2. In a September 8 newsroom post, the company said users had traded more than 45 billion contracts since launch, including more than 30 billion through the first eight months of 2026.
How is Robinhood expanding its prediction-market routing?
Robinhood said September 8 that it would begin routing a selection of football event contracts to Crypto.com’s CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse, which does business in the Crypto.com app as Crypto.com | Derivatives North America and in a separate trader-focused app under the OG.com brand. The company said event contracts on Robinhood would still also route to Kalshi, ForecastEX, and Rothera.
The deal gives Robinhood equity stakes in Crypto.com and OG.com after OG.com’s spin-off as an independent trading platform. Robinhood said the equity would be priced in line with Citadel Securities’ recent investment in Crypto.com Group at a $20 billion valuation. OG.com said the transaction included a standalone $5 billion valuation for OG.com.
That structure matters because Robinhood is not simply adding another venue. It is broadening its exposure across regulated infrastructure at a time when prediction-market operators are fighting over which products can be offered nationwide and who gets to supervise them. Robinhood’s role is also different from that of specialist exchanges: it is a retail broker and app distributor using multiple exchange partners rather than operating solely as a prediction-market venue.
Why are sports contracts drawing more legal pressure?
Sports event contracts have become the industry’s most visible legal flashpoint because state gambling regulators and attorneys general have challenged whether the products are federally regulated derivatives or state-regulated wagers. Crypto-linked contracts raise different product questions, but the sports category has produced the clearest record of state enforcement actions and federal preemption litigation.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James announced July 31 that New York had sued KalshiEX LLC in New York Supreme Court, alleging that Kalshi was operating an illegal, unlicensed gambling business. The attorney general’s release said the state was seeking an order stopping Kalshi from operating as an unlicensed gambling business, along with forfeiture of illegal gains, restitution, and fines equal to three times the gains the company allegedly made through illegal activity.
Reuters reported that Kalshi sought to move the New York action to federal court within hours of the filing. New York’s case followed an earlier federal ruling in which U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres denied Kalshi’s request for a preliminary injunction against New York gambling enforcement. Reuters reported July 8 that Torres found the Commodity Exchange Act did not supersede New York gambling laws as applied to Kalshi’s sports-event contracts.
The CFTC has taken the opposite position in its own lawsuits against states. In an April 24 release, the agency said it sued New York in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York seeking a declaratory judgment that federal law gives the CFTC exclusive authority over event contracts and a permanent injunction against enforcement of preempted state laws against CFTC registrants. The CFTC said that action followed similar lawsuits in Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois.
The agency expanded that campaign in June. In a June 23 release announcing a lawsuit against Kentucky, the CFTC said Kentucky had filed civil enforcement actions against CFTC-regulated designated contract markets and created a special transaction fee on those markets. The same release said the CFTC had also initiated legal proceedings against Minnesota, Illinois, and Rhode Island, and had filed amicus briefs in other prediction-market cases.
Where do Kalshi and Polymarket fit into Robinhood’s strategy?
Kalshi remains one of Robinhood’s routing partners, so Robinhood’s expansion does not remove Kalshi from the platform. It does, however, reduce Robinhood’s dependence on any single venue at a time when Kalshi’s sports contracts are under direct challenge in several states.
Polymarket is part of the same broader competitive and legal story, though its posture differs from Kalshi’s because Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated designated contract market. Baltimore filed consumer-protection suits against Kalshi and Polymarket in August, and Kentucky has also pursued prediction-market litigation. The CFTC’s lawsuits are aimed at preserving federal authority over registered exchanges, a protection that does not apply in the same way to every market operator.
Robinhood’s distribution gives the company a different kind of leverage. Its second-quarter Form 10-Q reported 28.4 million funded customers and $368.7 billion in total platform assets as of June 30. Its August operating-data release, published September 10, reported 28.6 million funded customers and $384 billion in total platform assets as of August 31. Those figures do not decide the legal question, but they show why exchange partners have an incentive to be available inside Robinhood’s app.
What are the next milestones?
The next test is whether Robinhood’s broader routing network changes the company’s event-contract mix in the third quarter and fall sports season. Robinhood has not posted a confirmed Q3 2026 earnings date on its investor-relations events page as of September 21, but its monthly operating data will offer the first interim read on volumes after the Crypto.com and OG.com routing announcement.
The legal calendar is just as important. New York’s Kalshi case, the CFTC’s federal preemption suits, and related state actions will shape whether sports contracts remain available on national, CFTC-regulated rails or face state-by-state limits. Tenev’s crypto-contract thesis is partly a business forecast, but it is also a map of where Robinhood may see cleaner room to grow while the sports-contract cases move through court.
