Stunning Ascent: Rothera Captures Third Place
Last week, Odaily Planet Daily reported that Robinhood built its own prediction market, Rothera, aiming to reduce reliance on Kalshi. Although external expectations had anticipated no cold-start issues, the platform's performance over the past week far exceeded forecasts. Within just half a month of launch, Rothera directly vaulted to No.3 in the highly competitive prediction market sector, behind only Kalshi and Polymarket.
According to Artemis data, in the week ending June 8, Rothera's weekly trading volume was only $21.9 million, far behind second-tier platforms like Opinion, Predict, and Limitless. However, by the week ending June 15, its weekly volume surged to $276 million, directly entering the top three. In the latest week ending June 22, Rothera's weekly volume further increased to $559 million, roughly one-fifth of Polymarket's volume over the same period.
Stock Migration: Orders Flowing from Kalshi to Robinhood
It must be clarified that Rothera's rise is essentially a migration of existing orders rather than the creation of new users. Over the past year, Robinhood has been one of Kalshi's most important distribution channels. Leveraging tens of millions of retail users and mature trading entry points for stocks, options, and crypto, Robinhood funneled a large volume of orders to Kalshi. Piper Sandler analysts estimated that orders completed through Robinhood accounted for about 25% to 35% of Kalshi's total volume.
The problem was that while these orders came from Robinhood users, they did not belong to Robinhood. Under the previous cooperation model, Robinhood acted as a front-end traffic gateway, while Kalshi provided the infrastructure for matching, clearing, and settlement, with revenue shared between them. Rothera is Robinhood's weapon to break this revenue-sharing model. Since early June, Robinhood has begun migrating some World Cup-related event contracts to Rothera for internal execution, meaning a large number of orders that would have flowed to Kalshi are now kept within Robinhood's ecosystem.
Therefore, Rothera's surge in trading volume is less a threat to other prediction markets like Polymarket, Predict, or Limitless, and more a direct "bloodletting" of Kalshi. Rothera's growth strengthens Robinhood's ability to capture value from prediction market orders.
Revenue Potential: The $1 Billion Vision
Hood House, a research account that tracks Robinhood long-term, compiled public data showing that as of June 20, Robinhood's prediction market business executed 34,700 contracts in a single day, generating daily revenue of approximately $4.9 million. Specifically, Rothera (which mainly hosts World Cup-related markets) processed 137 million contracts per day with a trading volume of about $47 million; in comparison, Kalshi's total daily trading volume was about 1.5 billion contracts, corresponding to a volume of $416 million. Excluding World Cup-related markets, Kalshi's daily volume was about 1 billion contracts with a volume of $260 million.
Hood House noted that Robinhood users still contribute approximately 20% (conservatively) of Kalshi's non-World Cup trading volume, equivalent to 210 million contracts and $52 million in turnover executed through Robinhood. Based on a bold extrapolation, if growth continues, Robinhood's prediction market business could achieve an annual revenue scale of $1 billion, surpassing Robinhood's previous peak crypto-related revenue of about $900 million achieved in 2025.
Reshaping Competitive Landscape
Facing Rothera's rapid rise, Kalshi has clearly recognized the issue. Robinhood has transformed from a partner into a direct competitor, with a large number of orders migrating to the in-house platform. Rothera's ascent proves the importance of distribution power — jumping to third place seems effortless, and challenging Kalshi and Polymarket in the future no longer appears a daunting task.