Why Does Robinhood Want a Slice of Crypto.com?

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This piece was written and researched by Omar El Safy and edited by Pet Berisha.

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Robinhood ($HOOD ( ▼ 1.69% )) has taken a multi-year distribution deal to carry OG.com's event contracts in the Robinhood app, making OG.com an infrastructure and clearing provider for its own retail flow. That came with a minority equity stake in both OG.com and its parent, Crypto.com, which clears on the NADEX DCO.

We do not know the terms or size of either stake. The pricing was set in line with Citadel Securities' $400 million investment on 16 July 2026, which valued Crypto.com at $20 billion. OG.com's standalone spin-off is valued at $5 billion.

Quick reminder:

A DCM and DCO are valuable regulatory assets, but a licence on its own supplies no liquidity, market makers or customers, and a venue still needs those from somewhere.

CDNA is the largest clearing operation of the four, and the only one hosting multiple brands.

Robinhood already routes to three other venues for clearing, including its own, Rothera, which claims a sizeable chunk of US prediction-market volume.

That makes Robinhood’s move look counterintuitive at first glance. Kalshi still clears the overwhelming majority of US prediction-market notional, while CDNA and Rothera remain much smaller. The move is less about CDNA’s current share than the capabilities it gives Robinhood access to. It gives Robinhood another regulated venue with an established sports-contract offering.

As a share of each month's US notional, Kalshi has held between 82% and 87% since May 2026, while Rothera has climbed from 0.1% to 2% and CDNA has sat at 2% to 3%.

So why add a fourth?

One way to see just how much Robinhood still relies on outside venues is to look at the contracts it chooses to show customers.

Robinhood’s own event-contract page shows, on each day, which exchange each featured contract is sourced from (with some relatively low-level dev tools use, we got a few numbers).

By collecting those daily snapshots and using the Wayback Machine to recover older versions, we can reconstruct how the share of listed contracts attributed to each venue changed over time.

Rothera first appears on 1 June 2026, eleven days after it went live, carrying 1.4% of featured events. By the end of August 2026, it reached 16.1%. Kalshi went from 88.4% to 66.1% over the same hundred days.

On 31 August 2026, college football sat on Kalshi. By 9 September 2026, a portion of it had moved to OG and it is gone from Kalshi's featured set.

Robinhood controls that display layer, so the mix is a useful record of its own sourcing and routing choices over time. It is a proxy for distribution decisions rather than trading volume.

Rothera's own book tells the same story. While the World Cup was on, that is what traded. Once it finished, the volume moved to NFL, basketball and baseball. Which is exactly what you'd expect from a venue that used the World Cup as a launchpad.

Robinhood already routes to three other venues,

Robinhood is building an alternative to Kalshi, and it has chosen OG because it is the closest available substitute for what it has sourced from Kalshi to date: a functioning, liquid, CFTC-regulated exchange-and-clearing stack with an established catalogue of sports contracts, including college football and parlays.

Robinhood began routing a selection of college football contracts to OG on 8 September 2026, after college football had been supplied through Kalshi only days earlier.

ForecastEx is heavily skewed to weather, and Robinhood already sends weather contracts there.

Rothera is an affiliated venue, but its book is still shaped heavily by the World Cup, which accounts for 75.5% of all notional traded there, with baseball another 20.3% and pro and college football together below 1%. It isn't built to handle the demand Robinhood likely needs to keep it growing as a revenue line.

OG already has the product mix and operating history Robinhood needs. Its exchange cleared $28 million in college-football contracts over the selected period, versus $13 million at Rothera, roughly 2.2 times as much.

It also supports parlay-style contracts (combos), which traded $1.1 billion over this comparison period, a product closely associated with Kalshi’s sports expansion.

Across the same window, CDNA cleared $3.5 billion of notional activity across six brands, including OG, DraftKings ($DKNG ( ▲ 0.21% )), Fanatics and FanDuel ($FLUT ( ▼ 0.65% )).

OG alone did not clear $3.5 billion, but the underlying exchange, market-making relationships, risk controls and clearing operations were already being used at scale.

Rothera took from November 2025 to May 2026 to launch and is still working to find a durable post-World-Cup product mix.

By buying a minority position in OG and committing flow to its infrastructure, Robinhood gains exposure to a proven, sports-capable clearing stack much faster than it could build a second one itself.

Kalshi remains the broadest independent supplier and likely still the most important venue in Robinhood’s portfolio, for now. But the decision to move a live college football category to OG suggests that Robinhood is deliberately creating a route around Kalshi, and the ability to shift categories between providers is the strategic asset it is buying.

Robinhood is diversifying its options for clearing event contracts. It is sending categories to whichever exchange already has the right tooling, liquidity, product set and experience.

It also reduces Robinhood’s dependence on Kalshi. College football can move to OG, weather can sit with ForecastEx, and Rothera can keep developing the categories where it already has a foothold.

Kalshi is still the largest independent supplier, clearing 82-87% of US prediction-market notional volume every month from May to September 2026, and it has category breadth Robinhood cannot yet replicate elsewhere. But it is no longer the only place Robinhood can send its customers.

The OG investment is one step toward a second credible sports event contract supplier (prediction markets’ largest category).

The moat is users and liquidity. Robinhood has the users, and its ability to direct them gives it the power to help build liquidity wherever it chooses to send flow.

That means the exchanges need Robinhood too. It owns the customer relationship and can move flow between four venues, taking stakes in the infrastructure it wants to support.

The more routes it has, the easier it is to shift categories away from Kalshi when another exchange offers better economics, product coverage or liquidity. That reduces Kalshi’s hold over one of Robinhood’s fastest-growing products. Event contracts revenue grew more than 10 times year on year to $156 million in Q2 2026, already Robinhood’s second-largest trading line, behind only options.

Predicted is written by Pet Berisha and Omar El Safy. Every edition, our quarterly State of Prediction Markets reports and more at predicted.co.

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