Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said crypto-linked contracts are capturing a "disproportionate share" of the company's prediction markets business, and he expects sports wagers to fall into the minority within a few years.

Speaking with Jim Cramer on CNBC's "Mad Money," Tenev suggested crypto could do to sports betting what Robinhood once did to Wall Street commissions: eat its lunch. His comments arrive as the company's event-contracts operation scales rapidly. Event-contract revenue climbed more than tenfold year over year to $156 million in the second quarter of 2026, making prediction markets Robinhood's fastest-growing business line even as crypto trading revenue declined. Contracts traded 4.7 billion times in August alone, roughly 15 times the volume recorded in August 2025. Read together, the numbers show Robinhood's crypto-related business shifting toward event contracts, with prediction markets doing the growing while direct crypto trading declines.

Prediction markets, also known as event contracts, let traders buy and sell yes-or-no positions on whether something will actually happen—a Federal Reserve rate decision, an election, a football game—rather than placing a wager through a sportsbook. Prices shift with the market's assessment of each outcome, and positions can be traded until an event resolves. The instruments are regulated as derivatives by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency that also oversees futures and options—a distinction Tenev leans on to argue the products are not simply gambling with better branding.

"We're already seeing other categories like crypto taking a disproportionate share," Tenev told Cramer. "I think within a few years, sports will actually be in the minority, similar to active trading at large."

He described sports contracts as a "wedge" that got the business moving. "Sports has been a great tool to bring people in, get liquidity, get interest, establish," he said, "but I think the industry is also expanding beyond sports."

Robinhood built its event-contract hub on top of Kalshi, the exchange that fought and won a legal battle against the CFTC to offer election-related contracts. The company then layered on Rothera, its own CFTC-licensed joint venture with trading firm Susquehanna, which was tested during this year's World Cup. This month, Robinhood went further by taking minority equity stakes in Crypto.com and its prediction-market spinoff OG.com, adding a third partner to clear and settle trades.

Competition for the same market is intensifying. CME, a leading derivatives marketplace; Coinbase, a major crypto exchange; and a handful of decentralized platforms are racing to sign up traders for event contracts, a category that crypto-native platforms like Polymarket helped popularize years before Wall Street brokerages entered the space.

Tenev frames the expansion, spanning sports and crypto contracts alike, as a single bet on ownership. "We believe that ownership is essential, not just because if people are owners, they have skin in the game, they can benefit financially, but also a society where more people own high quality financial assets is inherently a more stable society," he said. It is the same pitch he uses to justify Robinhood's 3% match on retirement contributions.

Crypto contracts fit that philosophy neatly, he argued, because they turn an opinion into a trade. "You can directly, with prediction markets, monetize an idea or an insight," Tenev said, pointing to the Clarity Act, a bill in Congress that would settle which federal regulator polices digital assets, as an example. "If you have a particular view on crypto market structure legislation, the Clarity Act, we have a market on that."

Not everyone in Washington is cheering, particularly as that "we have a market on that" framing sounds to some critics like letting users bet on anything. Lawmakers have introduced more than 10 bills since January targeting prediction markets, including the PREDICT Act, which would ban members of Congress and senior officials from trading contracts tied to political events. Critics also argue that stacking sports and political wagers next to retirement accounts blurs the line between investing and gambling—a tension regulators are still working through. Until the Clarity Act and those bills are resolved, the rules governing crypto-linked contracts remain in flux.

Tenev, for his part, is not waiting for that debate to settle. His own projection points to a specific milestone: sports contracts becoming the minority of Robinhood's event-contract business within, in his words, "a few years."