HOOD
IBKR
The new side hustle gets a warning label
Robinhood has been making a surprisingly chunky amount of money from event contracts, and Congress has noticed. Rep. Ritchie Torres is preparing another bill aimed at prediction markets, this time trying to criminalize campaign-fund betting on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket.
That matters because Robinhood’s prediction-market setup isn’t some tiny experiment anymore. In Q1, the company said event contract revenue hit $147 million, up 320% year over year, with customers trading a record 8.8 billion contracts through its Kalshi-powered hub. In other words: this isn’t pocket change. It’s a real growth lane.
Why HOOD is the one sweating
Here’s the twist: the political panic is mostly about Polymarket, the offshore crypto-native platform that doesn’t play by the same CFTC-regulated rules. But Robinhood sits in the blast radius anyway, because it offers event contracts and its 10-Q already basically says, “hey, if federal or state law changes, this whole thing could get messy.”
And Robinhood isn’t alone in trying to build a prediction-markets money printer. Interactive Brokers just launched a unified platform last Thursday, bundling Kalshi, CME Group, and ForecastEx into one interface. Same basic idea, different wrapper: turn market bets into a new fee stream.
The real investor question
The legislative frenzy is still more headline than handcuffs. More than a dozen prediction market bills have been introduced this year, and none has exactly sprinted through Congress. But when a business line is growing this fast, even a whiff of regulation can knock the vibe off.
Big picture: Robinhood and IBKR are betting event contracts become the next shiny monetization layer. Washington is basically asking, “or what if not?” and that’s the part shareholders need to watch.