Robinhood Competes Directly With Kalshi

This marks the moment Robinhood stops being a customer acquisition channel for Kalshi and starts becoming another exchange fighting for the same order flow. At first, Kalshi supplied the regulated venue while Robinhood supplied the users and app surface. Once Robinhood gained its own CFTC licensed exchange and clearing stack through MIAXdx, it no longer needed Kalshi to list and clear the highest value contracts, especially sports contracts that already proved they can drive huge retail volume and revenue.1 2 3 4

• The old relationship was simple. Robinhood embedded Kalshi markets inside Robinhood, and Kalshi got volume it could not have reached on its own. Robinhood said prediction markets became its fastest growing product line by revenue, with more than 12 billion event contracts traded in 2025, which showed how valuable that distribution was to Kalshi.2 5 6
• Owning the venue changes where the economics sit. Instead of just passing trades to Kalshi and sharing in a thinner distribution layer, Robinhood can capture exchange and clearing economics itself, decide which contracts to prioritize, and keep the customer, the market data, and the trading behavior inside its own product loop.1 3 5
• This is also the template other large platforms can follow. Coinbase launched prediction markets with Kalshi handling market flow at launch, but Coinbase already has U.S. derivatives infrastructure and has framed prediction markets as part of a broader multi asset trading stack. That makes Kalshi partnerships useful, but not necessarily permanent.4 7 8

Going forward, the category looks less like one exchange syndicating contracts into many apps, and more like every major broker, sportsbook, and crypto exchange trying to own both distribution and venue economics. That pushes Kalshi to win on liquidity, contract breadth, and infrastructure speed, because its largest partners increasingly have reasons to become rivals.3 5 8