Robinhood’s expanding crypto bet meets a faster-moving prediction market boom
Robinhood is expanding beyond a retail brokerage into a global financial infrastructure platform. It launched Robinhood Chain, a public Ethereum layer-2 built on Arbitrum, to support tokenized stocks, DeFi, and trading tied to its wallet and global products. It also introduced Robinhood Earn, a decentralized lending product for eligible U.S. users, letting them lend USDG through self-custody wallets. At the same time, Robinhood is broadening internationally with crypto trading plans in the UK, Canada, and Singapore, plus new derivatives offerings in Europe and AI-enabled trading tools. A key revenue question is whether prediction markets will become larger than crypto trading. Event-contract volume has surged through Robinhood’s Kalshi partnership, and analysts estimate revenue could already rival Robinhood’s crypto transaction income. Overall, Robinhood is trying to own more of the underlying plumbing for trading—through its chain, prediction-market infrastructure, and derivatives products—so it can capture more economics and rely less on volatile crypto cycles.
