Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Azuma (@Azuma_eth)

The World Cup battle has begun, and the total transaction volume of the prediction market across the internet is continuously setting new highs. However, the mood at Kalshi, the leader in the industry, may not be very good at the moment.

The reason is not due to fluctuations in Kalshi's own business data, but because another strong competitor has "suddenly" appeared in front of Kalshi after Polymarket, and this opponent was once its most important ally.

• Odaily Note: The data comes from Defillama.

Kalshi's Most Important Traffic Channel - Robinhood

Let's turn back time to March 2025. At that time, Kalshi announced a partnership with the American online brokerage Robinhood, which would provide its users with predictive market trading services, allowing them to bet on events related to politics, economics, sports, and more.

From a business model perspective, this was a typical "win-win" situation - Robinhood, responsible for user entry and transaction distribution, could directly use Kalshi's mature products; while Kalshi, responsible for the underlying market, matching, clearing, and regulatory compliance system, could access the vast retail traffic pool owned by Robinhood.

The subsequent story also proved the "win-win" result of this cooperation. Through Robinhood's channel distribution, Kalshi indirectly gained a huge number of users and transaction volume, Piper Sandler analysts estimated that "the transaction volume completed through Robinhood channels accounted for approximately 25%-35% of Kalshi's total transaction volume." These orders eventually converted into revenues on both sides' books - Robinhood charges independently for all Kalshi event contracts traded through this channel, collecting $0.01 per direction per contract, which is then shared with Kalshi (specific proportion undisclosed).

The Q1 financial report disclosed at the end of April this year showed that Robinhood managed to trade 8.8 billion event contracts in Q1 of this year, leading to a 320% year-on-year increase in "other trading income," reaching $147 million. The prediction market has become the fastest-growing new engine in Robinhood's product line.

However, recently, this relationship has undergone some subtle changes.

Robinhood's Ambition: Reclaiming the Cake Shared with Kalshi

As history has repeatedly demonstrated in the internet era, when a channel gains enough voice, it will not be satisfied with just being a channel. Robinhood is no exception.

Although the partnership with Kalshi has also brought considerable revenue to Robinhood, as the prediction market has become one of the fastest-growing new businesses on the platform, Robinhood is no longer satisfied with the current profit-sharing scheme.

In the collaboration model between the two, Kalshi was responsible for providing the market and infrastructure, while Robinhood was responsible for providing users and order flow. However, as the cooperation deepened, Robinhood gradually realized that what is truly scarce may not be the market itself, but the user entry point that it firmly holds. After all, for most Robinhood users, they do not care whether the orders ultimately settle on Kalshi or another platform - what they see is just a trading entry within the Robinhood App, not the infrastructure provider behind it.

In other words, Robinhood always holds one of the most important resources in the prediction market - distribution capability. Since users belong to them, why should the orders flow to others?

In fact, while Robinhood quickly validated the demand for the prediction market with the help of Kalshi, another Plan B was also launched shortly thereafter.

In November 2025, Robinhood announced a joint venture with Wall Street quantitative trading giant Susquehanna and planned to acquire the CFTC-regulated derivatives exchange MIAXdx. According to official statements, this joint venture will operate an independent futures and derivatives exchange and clearing agency in the future, with the prediction market being one of its key layout directions. At that time, the outside world regarded it more as an investment in infrastructure, but as more information was disclosed later, people gradually realized that Robinhood's goals were far beyond just finding new partners for the prediction market.

In January 2026, the transaction was formally completed. Robinhood and Susquehanna gained 90% control over MIAXdx while taking over a complete CFTC regulatory framework, including Designated Contract Market (DCM) and Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) qualifications. Subsequently, MIAXdx was renamed Rothera Exchange, and its clearing agency was renamed Rothera Clearing.

As of now, Robinhood has acquired the core elements required to independently operate a prediction market, and all that is missing is a mature product comparable to Kalshi, but for Robinhood, which is rich in internet product development experience, this is obviously not a difficult task.

The Opportunity for Rothera: The World Cup

In June 2026, after about six months of accelerated development, the Rothera product gradually took shape, and Robinhood finally made the almost inevitable move - gradually transferring orders originally flowing to Kalshi into its own controlled system.

Robinhood specifically chose an excellent battlefield for Rothera's launch - the World Cup. For the prediction market, the World Cup is undoubtedly one of the most traffic-generating trading themes; whether it's match outcomes, qualifying results, or championship claims, the related markets can attract a large number of new users to participate in trading in a short time. For the nascent Rothera platform, there is no better scenario for cold-starting than the World Cup.

According to Robinhood's official disclosure, during the World Cup consisting of 104 matches, some event contracts will be directed to Rothera for matching and clearing, including individual World Cup match results, final championship outcomes, total goals in individual matches, and other markets. Compared to the previous model that relied entirely on Kalshi, this marks Robinhood's first large-scale import of predictive market orders into its trading system.

In terms of results, Rothera clearly seized this opportunity. According to data disclosed by investment research media Hood House, on June 12, Rothera completed 44.2 million contract trades, corresponding to a transaction volume of approximately $24.4 million; on June 13, Rothera completed another 69.7 million contract trades, corresponding to a transaction volume of about $20.9 million... Although these numbers still lag behind Kalshi's popular markets measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, considering that Rothera had only been online for a few days, this performance is already quite successful.

For Robinhood and Kalshi, this indicates an imbalanced trend in their cooperation. On Robinhood's side, the service fee income that originally needed to be shared with Kalshi can now be retained more within its own ecosystem; while on Kalshi's side, this signals that one of its previously most important growth engines is showing signs of weakening.

Moreover, the World Cup is clearly just the beginning of Rothera encroaching on Kalshi. Looking further into the future, Robinhood will inevitably expand Rothera's coverage to more sports events as well as economic and political themes, those orders that originally flowed to Kalshi will subsequently be diverted by Rothera.

Since Robinhood and Kalshi have never disclosed the profit-sharing ratio between them, we cannot determine the specific value of this diversion. However, considering that Robinhood achieved $147 million in prediction market-related revenue in Q1 alone, while the World Cup in Q2 and the upcoming midterm elections obviously can bring larger-scale trading activities, this diversion value could potentially amount to hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis.

Who Controls Distribution, Who Controls Everything

The shift from allies to adversaries between Robinhood and Kalshi once again illustrates a logic repeatedly validated in the internet market - products are easy to create, but traffic is hard to find; whoever controls distribution controls everything.

In recent years, the market has generally believed that Kalshi's core competitive moat comes from its regulatory licenses, exchange qualifications, and clearing capabilities. Therefore, whether it is brokerages like Robinhood or various media, communities, and traffic platforms, they essentially serve as channels and traffic entrances for Kalshi. However, the emergence of Rothera proves one thing: in an era of severe product homogenization, the product itself may not be the most important factor. What is truly scarce is always the users.

Wherever the users are, there will be liquidity; where there is liquidity, there will be a market. When Robinhood holds access to tens of millions of retail users, it is fully capable of directing those users to any trading venue. For the users, they do not care whether their orders ultimately settle on Kalshi or Rothera, as long as the experience does not differ significantly; who is behind the matching and clearing does not matter.

If the theme of the past few years in the predictive market industry was the market competition between Polymarket and Kalshi, then the theme for the coming years may turn into a channel war. Robinhood incubating Rothera is essentially a reverse integration initiated from the channel to the market layer; as more platforms that have traffic entrances begin to realize the strategic value of prediction markets, similar stories are likely to continue unfolding. Whether it is exchanges, brokerages, social platforms, or media platforms, all could become new entry points for the prediction market.

And when the entry begins to seize the market and the channel starts to own pricing power, the ultimate winner in the prediction market industry may no longer be the platform responsible for matching orders, but the one closest to the users, the one best able to control distribution.

This has been true in the internet era, and it is no different in the mobile internet era. This time, there is nothing unexpected.

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