A report Sunday from The Information argues it’s the latter, with the companies increasingly competing head to head: Coinbase is entering the stock trading space, Robinhood is expanding its crypto offering, and both companies are focusing on prediction markets. With the stock and crypto markets overlapping more and more, the two companies are now competing for the same customer base, The Information added. Robinhood’s shares, the report added, jumped 186% during 2025, while Coinbase’s were down 12%, even with a crypto-friendly administration in the White House. Coinbase’s shares had been doing well until October, when the crypto market saw its largest decline in three years.
Robinhood, meanwhile, generated roughly a fifth of its revenue from its crypto operations in the third quarter of 2025. “If there’s a crypto winter, they’re not going to be suffering from it as much as Coinbase will,” Dan Dolev, equity research senior analyst at Mizuho, told The Information. The report also notes Robinhood’s speed in entering the prediction markets, introducing its first event contract—for the winner of last year’s presidential election—in 2024 before expanding into areas like sports. Prediction markets became Robinhood’s fastest growing source of revenue, bringing in $300 million according to the company’s third-quarter earnings report.
The company’s number of total event contracts traded came to 2.3 billion in the third quarter, and it totaled 2.5 billion in October alone, the report said. “I think it’s really exciting to see where this can go,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said during an earnings call in November. “I mean, we love being early to this new asset class, and some people are saying this could be one of the largest asset classes because you can price risk in pretty much anything.” “Prediction markets are only as good as their participation and incentives. Thin liquidity can distort prices, while speculative fervor can overwhelm informational value,” the report said.
There are also ethical and social concerns about commodifying sensitive events, from elections to public health outcomes. Consumer protection remains a pressing issue, particularly as platforms attract users who may not fully understand the risks or distinctions between trading and gambling.
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