Xếp hạng thứ ba ngay khi ra mắt, Rothera đang làm đảo lộn cục diện thị trường dự đoán
- Quan điểm cốt lõi: Thị trường dự đoán tự xây dựng Rothera của Robinhood chỉ sau nửa tháng ra mắt đã vươn lên vị trí thứ ba trong ngành, với khối lượng giao dịch hàng tuần đạt 559 triệu USD. Sự trỗi dậy của nó thực chất là thông qua việc chiếm dòng các đơn hàng tồn đọng vốn thuộc về đối tác Kalshi, qua đó tăng cường khả năng thu giữ giá trị của chính mình, và có thể lật đổ cục diện cạnh tranh hiện tại của thị trường dự đoán.
- Các yếu tố chính:
- Trong vòng ba tuần kể từ khi ra mắt, khối lượng giao dịch hàng tuần của Rothera đã tăng vọt từ 21,9 triệu USD lên 559 triệu USD, chỉ xếp sau Kalshi và Polymarket, tốc độ tăng trưởng rất nhanh.
- Sự tăng trưởng của Rothera chủ yếu đến từ việc chuyển các đơn hàng vốn chảy đến Kalshi qua kênh Robinhood sang nền tảng của chính mình, đây là một cuộc di dời khối lượng hiện có chứ không phải tạo ra người dùng mới.
- Robinhood từng đóng góp khoảng 25%-35% khối lượng giao dịch cho Kalshi, giờ đây thông qua nền tảng riêng để chiếm dòng trực tiếp, giảm bớt việc chia sẻ doanh thu với Kalshi.
- Theo ước tính của Hood House, doanh thu mảng thị trường dự đoán của Robinhood đạt khoảng 4,9 triệu USD mỗi ngày, có khả năng đạt mức doanh thu 1 tỷ USD trong năm nay, vượt qua mức đỉnh lịch sử doanh thu tiền điện tử của họ.
- Để đối phó với cạnh tranh, Kalshi đang tiếp xúc với các ngân hàng đầu tư để tìm kiếm IPO, đồng thời lợi dụng điều này để yêu cầu các ngân hàng đầu tư kết nối với hệ thống của mình, nhằm khai thác các kênh phân phối mới như ngân hàng, công ty chứng khoán.
Original: Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author: Azuma (@azuma_eth)
Last week, Odaily Planet Daily published an article titled "The First Prediction Market Concept Stock Has Arrived!", which mainly discussed how Robinhood is building its own prediction market, Rothera, to intercept orders that previously relied on Kalshi for execution. This move aims to reduce revenue sharing with Kalshi and keep profits within its own system.
Although we had anticipated that Rothera wouldn't face the cold start problem common among other competitors, the platform's data performance over the past week still far exceeded our previous expectations. After all, it's hard to imagine a platform that launched just two weeks ago directly claiming the third position in the highly competitive prediction market, sitting only behind the two giants, Kalshi and Polymarket.
Artemis data shows that in the week ending June 8, Rothera, as a new platform, had a weekly trading volume of only $21.9 million, still lagging significantly behind second-tier platforms like Opinion, Predict, and Limitless. However, in the week ending June 15, Rothera's weekly trading volume directly jumped to third place in the industry, reaching $276 million. In the latest week ending June 22, Rothera's weekly trading volume increased to $559 million, nearly one-fifth of Polymarket's volume.
An Atypical Growth Case (Feel free to skip if you read the previous article)
It's important to clarify: Rothera's rise is not fundamentally driven by the creation of new users (though some may have entered due to the World Cup), but rather a migration of existing orders, not 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 cryptocurrencies, Robinhood has funneled a large number of orders to Kalshi. Analysts at Piper Sandler estimated that trading volume completed through Robinhood's channel accounted for approximately 25%-35% of Kalshi's total trading volume.
The problem lies in the fact that although these orders originate from Robinhood users, they don't belong to Robinhood itself. Under the previous cooperation model, Robinhood acted more as a front-end traffic gateway, while Kalshi was the actual infrastructure provider responsible for matching, clearing, and settlement. Revenue generated from each transaction needed to be shared between the two parties.
Rothera is Robinhood's weapon to break this profit-sharing model. Since the beginning of this month, Robinhood has started moving some World Cup-related event contracts for execution within Rothera. This means a large number of orders that would have previously flowed to Kalshi are now staying within Robinhood's own system.
Therefore, in a sense, the surge in Rothera's trading volume is less of a threat to other prediction markets like Polymarket, Predict, or Limitless, and more a direct attempt to "bleed" Kalshi.
Robinhood's Value Capture
The rapid growth of Rothera has the most direct impact of strengthening Robinhood's ability to capture value from prediction market orders on its platform.
Hood House, a research and investment self-media that has long tracked Robinhood, compiled based on public data. It stated that as of June 20, Robinhood's prediction market business traded a total of 34,700 contracts in a single day, corresponding to a daily revenue of approximately $4.9 million.
Hood House then disclosed its calculation logic:
- Rothera (primarily hosting World Cup-related markets) had a daily trading volume of 137 million contracts, corresponding to a value of approximately $47 million;
- For comparison, Kalshi's total daily trading volume was about 1.5 billion contracts, corresponding to a value of approximately $416 million. Excluding World Cup-related markets, Kalshi's volume was about 1 billion contracts, corresponding to a value of approximately $260 million;
- Considering that Robinhood users currently contribute approximately 20% of Kalshi's non-World Cup market volume (a conservative estimate), this means that out of Kalshi's non-World Cup event contract volume, about 210 million contracts and $52 million in value were completed through Robinhood.
Based on this, Hood House made a further aggressive estimate: If this growth rate continues, Robinhood's prediction market business has the potential to achieve revenue on the scale of $1 billion this year. This figure even exceeds Robinhood's historical peak in cryptocurrency-related revenue, which was approximately $900 million achieved in 2025.
Kalshi's Response Strategy: Finding New Channels
Facing Rothera's rapid rise, Kalshi is clearly aware of the problem.
For Kalshi, Robinhood was both a partner and one of its most important traffic sources. However, as Robinhood begins migrating more and more orders to its own platform, the two have become direct competitors.
A recent piece of news disclosed by The Information might hint at Kalshi's response strategy. Sources familiar with the matter revealed that Kalshi has started contacting several investment banks for early, informal discussions regarding a potential future IPO. What's more noteworthy is that during these communications, Kalshi reportedly presented a clear requirement to the investment banks: if they wish to qualify for underwriting the future IPO, these institutions need to prioritize technically integrating their systems with Kalshi, allowing their institutional clients to directly participate in trading event contracts on the Kalshi platform.
In other words, Kalshi is leveraging the IPO opportunity to find new distribution channels, integrating the prediction market into the client networks of banks, brokerages, and other financial institutions. This might also signify a subtle shift in the competitive landscape of the prediction market industry. In the past, the market focused on who could offer more contracts and who could design better products. Now, as prediction markets gradually move towards mainstream finance, the competitive focus is shifting to another dimension: whoever controls the user entry point effectively controls the value.
Rothera's rise has proven the significance of distribution capabilities. Landing directly in the third spot in the sector seemed effortless, and whether it can challenge Kalshi and Polymarket in the future doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem either.
