Robinhood has taken minority equity stakes in Crypto.com and OG.com, the prediction-markets exchange Crypto.com recently spun off, and named OG.com the clearing and infrastructure partner for its fast-growing event-contracts business. The brokerage announced the multi-year agreement on September 8, 2026, and began routing certain US football event contracts to OG.com's federally regulated venue the same day, timing the switch to the pro-football season and the run-up to the November midterm elections.
Neither company said how large the stakes are, how much Robinhood paid, or what governance rights the equity carries. What they did disclose is the yardstick used to price it: the roughly $20 billion valuation that Citadel Securities, the Wall Street market-making giant, set when it invested in the Crypto.com group in July. That figure splits into about $15 billion for Crypto.com itself and about $5 billion for the newly separate OG.com. A widely circulated headline pinned the $5 billion on "Crypto.com and its spin-off" together, but the number belongs to OG.com alone.
What Robinhood is actually buying
OG.com is not a household name, and that is the point of the deal. It is the regulated machinery underneath the trade. The unit does business through the North American Derivatives Exchange, or Nadex, a venue registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as both a designated contract market and a derivatives clearing organization, and through OG Broker, a CFTC-registered futures commission merchant. In plain terms, OG.com can both list an event contract and clear it, the two functions a brokerage like Robinhood would otherwise have to rent from separate partners.
The two registrations matter more than the jargon suggests. A designated contract market is the layer where a contract is listed and traded; a derivatives clearing organization is the layer that stands between buyers and sellers and guarantees the trade settles. Holding both under one roof is what lets OG.com pitch itself, in its own founder's words, as a single "most liquid venue" rather than a storefront bolted onto someone else's clearinghouse.
That is what Robinhood is buying: not a consumer brand but the federally sanctioned plumbing that lets a US customer hold a position on, say, the outcome of a football game as a regulated derivative rather than an offshore transaction. By taking equity in the exchange engine at the same time, Robinhood ties its own economics to the venue it is routing volume into.
From customer to part-owner
Robinhood entered event contracts as a customer of other people's exchanges. Kalshi, the largest US prediction-markets exchange, was its first partner, and Robinhood later launched its own venue, Rothera, an event-contract exchange built with the trading firm Susquehanna International Group. The OG.com agreement is a different posture: Robinhood is no longer only routing orders, it is holding equity in the infrastructure it routes them through.
JB Mackenzie, Robinhood's vice president and general manager for futures and prediction markets, framed it that way in the announcement. "Teaming up with Crypto.com and OG.com strengthens our position as a leader in the prediction markets space and gives us even more skin in the game," he said, adding that prediction markets are "becoming an increasingly meaningful way for investors to engage with the events they care about."
Kris Marszalek, who founded and runs both Crypto.com and OG.com, cast the football contracts as an opening move. "This is the beginning of a strategic partnership between both companies," he said, describing a plan to make OG.com "the most liquid venue globally for innovative derivative instruments, starting with prediction markets and quickly expanding into futures and perpetuals." He told The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the agreement, that "the prediction-market event contracts are just the first product we're going to be launching together."
Why football, and why now
The timing is not incidental. Football event contracts went live for eligible US customers on the day of the announcement, at the start of the pro-football season, when interest in weekly game outcomes is at its peak. Behind that is a larger prize: the November midterm elections, the event class that made prediction markets a national story in the last US presidential cycle.
Election contracts are where the category's volume has historically spiked, and where the crowd's pricing gets quoted as a live read on the race. Traders can already watch the balance-of-power questions move contract by contract.
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A record quarter behind the deal
Robinhood is not experimenting at the margin. Event contracts have become one of its fastest-growing lines. In the second quarter the business posted a record $156 million in revenue, up more than tenfold from a year earlier, on a record 13.6 billion contracts traded. That sat inside total net revenue of $1.31 billion for the quarter, itself up 32% year-over-year. A line that barely registered twelve months ago is now large enough to justify buying a piece of the exchange it runs on.
The growth also explains the shape of the OG.com deal. A company booking record contract volume every quarter has a direct interest in owning the exchange economics rather than paying them away to a partner, and in locking in clearing capacity before election season stresses the system.
The market Robinhood is chasing
The company is moving into a category that has gone from niche to mainstream in under two years. Combined trading volume across Kalshi and Polymarket, the two names most readers associate with prediction markets, reached about $50 billion in 2025 and has already topped $130 billion so far in 2026. Robinhood's stake in OG.com is a claim on that growth continuing, taken not by holding any single contract but by owning part of the venue where the contracts clear.
The legal question hanging over the category
The expansion is not free of legal risk. OG's operating entity went to federal court in July against Washington state's attorney general and gaming commissioners, seeking a ruling that state gaming laws do not apply to its exchange. The suit is a pre-emptive one: rather than wait to be charged, the company is asking a federal judge to declare that a CFTC-regulated derivatives market sits under federal commodities law, not state gaming statutes. This is explicitly the argument that an event contract is a regulated financial instrument rather than a game of chance, and the distinction is the whole ballgame for the industry. If event contracts are derivatives, they fall squarely under federal commodities law; if a state can pull them under its own gaming rules instead, the model fractures at every state line.
That fight is unresolved, and it is the backdrop against which Robinhood chose to buy in rather than stay a customer.
What was left undisclosed
For all the specificity on valuation, the deal's most basic numbers are missing. Robinhood and Crypto.com did not reveal the stake percentages, the dollars invested, or the governance rights attached. Marszalek has said no decision has been made on the timing of Crypto.com's planned IPO. Whether the OG-routed contracts lift Robinhood's third-quarter event revenue above the record $156 million it booked in the second will be the first hard test of whether the plumbing change moves the business, and not just the org chart.
For now the clearest signal is structural, not financial. Robinhood has stopped renting the rails under its event-contract business and started owning a slice of them, priced off a valuation someone else set two months earlier and stapled to a spin-off most of its customers have never heard of. The dollar figures that would tell anyone how big a slice, and how big a claim on Crypto.com's coming IPO, are exactly the ones both companies chose not to publish. Until they do, the deal reads as a statement of direction, football first, elections next, futures and perpetuals after that, with the price of the ticket withheld.
