Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
The battle of the World Cup has begun, and the total trading volume of the predictive market continues to hit new highs. However, as the industry leader, Kalshi might not be in the best mood right now.
The reason is not due to fluctuations in Kalshi's own business data, but because Kalshi now "suddenly" faces another formidable rival besides Polymarket, and this opponent was once its most important ally.
- Odaily Note: Data sourced from Defillama.
Kalshi's Most Important Traffic Channel — Robinhood
Rewind to March 2025. At that time, Kalshi announced a partnership with the US online broker Robinhood, where the latter would use Kalshi's services to offer its users predictive market trading, allowing them to place bets on events like politics, economics, and sports.
From a business model perspective, this was a typical case of "mutual benefit" — Robinhood, responsible for user access and transaction distribution, could directly use Kalshi's mature product; Kalshi, responsible for the underlying market, matching, clearing, and regulatory compliance systems, could reach Robinhood's massive retail user pool.
The subsequent story proved the "win-win" outcome of this partnership. Through Robinhood's channel distribution, Kalshi indirectly gained massive users and transaction volume. Piper Sandler analysts once estimated that "trading volume completed through Robinhood's channel accounted for about 25%-35% of Kalshi's total trading volume." These orders ultimately translated into revenue for both parties — Robinhood would independently charge for all Kalshi event contracts traded through its channel, a fixed fee of $0.01 per contract per direction, and then share the revenue with Kalshi (the specific proportion was not disclosed).
The Q1 financial report disclosed at the end of April showed that Robinhood facilitated the trading of 8.8 billion event contracts in Q1, driving "other trading revenue" to grow by 320% year-on-year, reaching $147 million. The predictive market has become the brightest new growth engine in Robinhood's product line.
However, recently, this relationship has undergone some subtle changes.
Robinhood's Ambition: Taking Back the Cake Shared with Kalshi
As internet history has proven countless times, when a channel gains enough leverage, it is no longer content with being just a channel. Robinhood is no exception.
Although the partnership with Kalshi also brought substantial revenue to Robinhood, as the predictive market became one of the fastest-growing new businesses on the platform, Robinhood was no longer satisfied with the current revenue-sharing arrangement.
In their cooperation model, Kalshi was responsible for providing the market and infrastructure, while Robinhood was responsible for providing users and order flow. However, as the partnership deepened, Robinhood gradually realized that what is truly scarce might not be the market itself, but the user access it firmly controls. After all, for most Robinhood users, they don't care whether their orders are ultimately executed on Kalshi or another platform — users only see a trading entry within the Robinhood app, not the underlying infrastructure provider.
In other words, Robinhood always held one of the most critical resources for the predictive market — distribution power. If the users belong to Robinhood, why should the order flow go to someone else?
In fact, just as Robinhood was quickly validating the demand for predictive markets through Kalshi, a Plan B was quietly launched shortly thereafter.
In November 2025, Robinhood announced the formation of a joint venture with Wall Street quantitative trading giant Susquehanna and planned to acquire the CFTC-regulated derivatives exchange MIAXdx. According to the official statement, this joint venture would operate an independent futures and derivatives exchange and clearing organization in the future, with predictive markets being one of its key focus areas. At the time, the outside world largely viewed it as an infrastructure investment. However, as more information was disclosed later, people gradually realized Robinhood's goal was far beyond just finding a new partner for predictive markets.
In January 2026, the transaction was completed. Robinhood and Susquehanna gained 90% control of MIAXdx, simultaneously acquiring a complete CFTC regulatory framework, including Designated Contract Market (DCM) and Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) licenses. Subsequently, MIAXdx was renamed Rothera Exchange, and its clearing organization was renamed Rothera Clearing.
At this point, Robinhood possessed the core elements needed to independently operate a predictive market, lacking only a mature product comparable to Kalshi. However, for Robinhood, with its rich experience in internet product development, this was evidently not a difficult task.
Rothera's Opportunity: The World Cup
In June 2026, after about half a year of accelerated development, the Rothera product gradually took shape, and Robinhood finally made the move that was almost destined to happen — gradually shifting the orders that originally flowed to Kalshi into its own controlled system.
Robinhood specifically chose an ideal launch battleground for Rothera — the World Cup. For predictive markets, the World Cup is undoubtedly one of the most high-traffic trading themes. Whether it's match outcomes, advancement results, or champion predictions, related markets can attract a large number of new users to trade in a short period. For the newly launched Rothera platform, there is no better scenario for a cold start than the World Cup.
According to Robinhood's official disclosure, during this World Cup with a total of 104 matches, some event contracts will be directed to Rothera for matching and clearing, including markets for single World Cup match results, the ultimate World Cup champion, total goals in a single match, and others. Compared to the previous model that relied entirely on Kalshi, this marks the first time Robinhood has introduced predictive market orders into its own trading system on a large scale.
Judging by the results, Rothera clearly seized this opportunity. According to data disclosed by Hood House, an investment research media tracking Robinhood's activities, on June 12, Rothera completed 44.2 million contract trades, corresponding to a dollar trading volume of approximately $24.4 million; on June 13, Rothera completed 69.7 million contract trades, corresponding to a dollar trading volume of approximately $20.9 million... Although these figures still lag behind Kalshi's popular markets, which often involve hundreds of millions of dollars, considering that Rothera has literally just launched a few days ago, this performance is sufficiently successful.
For both Robinhood and Kalshi, this signifies that the balance of their cooperation has begun to tilt. From Robinhood's perspective, the transaction fee revenue that previously had to be shared with Kalshi can now be kept more within its own ecosystem. From Kalshi's perspective, this means that one of its most important growth engines has begun to show signs of weakening.
And the World Cup is clearly just the beginning of Rothera's encroachment on Kalshi. Looking further into the future, Robinhood will inevitably expand Rothera's coverage to more sporting events, as well as economic and political themes. Those orders that originally flowed to Kalshi will be intercepted one by one by Rothera.
Since Robinhood and Kalshi have never publicly disclosed their revenue-sharing ratio (some reports say 50%:50%, but no official information is available), we cannot know the exact monetary value of this interception. However, considering that Robinhood alone generated $147 million in predictive market-related revenue in Q1, and the Q2 World Cup and the more distant mid-term elections will likely bring even larger-scale trading activities, calculated on an annual basis, the value of this interception could reach several billion dollars.
Who Controls Distribution, Controls Everything
The drama of Robinhood and Kalshi moving from allies to opponents once again illustrates a logic repeatedly proven in the internet market — products are easy to build, but traffic is hard to find; whoever controls distribution controls everything.
Over the past few years, the market generally believed that Kalshi's core moat came from regulatory licenses, exchange qualifications, and clearing capabilities. Therefore, whether it was brokers like Robinhood or various media, communities, and traffic platforms, they were essentially just Kalshi's channel partners and traffic inlets. However, the emergence of Rothera proves one thing: in today's landscape of severe product homogenization, the product itself might not be the most critical element. What is truly scarce is always the user.
Where the users are, the liquidity is; where the liquidity is, the market will be. When Robinhood controls the access to tens of millions of retail users, it has the full capability to direct these users to any trading venue. For users, they don't care whether their orders are ultimately executed on Kalshi or Rothera. As long as the experience doesn't significantly differ, it doesn't matter who is matching or clearing behind the scenes.
If the theme of the predictive market industry in the past few years was the market battle between Polymarket and Kalshi, then the theme for the coming years might become a channel war. Robinhood incubating Rothera is essentially a reverse integration initiated by the channel side towards the market layer. As more and more platforms with traffic inlets begin to realize the strategic value of predictive markets, similar stories are highly likely to continue occurring. Whether it's exchanges, brokers, social platforms, or media platforms, they could all become new predictive market entry points.
And when inlets start to control the market, and channels begin to have pricing power, the ultimate winner in the predictive market industry might no longer be the platform responsible for order matching, but the one closest to the user and most capable of controlling distribution.
This was true in the internet era and the mobile internet era. This time, there's no exception either.
