Robinhood is using the 2026 World Cup to bring Rothera deeper into its prediction markets business, expanding the app’s soccer offering just days after the Robinhood-backed exchange began powering its first event contracts.
The company said Thursday that it is launching World Cup markets covering individual matches, group and tournament winners, spreads, totals, player contracts and combos. Some of those contracts will be routed through Rothera, a CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse formerly known as MIAXdx/LedgerX that is now controlled by a Robinhood and Susquehanna International Group joint venture.
“The World Cup is a global phenomenon and is the perfect event to launch Rothera,” JB Mackenzie, Robinhood’s vice president and general manager of futures and prediction markets, said in the announcement. “We’re now delivering even more value for customers as we continue on our mission to make Robinhood the best place to trade prediction markets.”
The World Cup rollout follows Robinhood’s first Rothera-linked markets late last week. Those included select Major League Baseball contracts, Core PCE Price Index markets and weekly jobless claims markets, matching the first Rothera contracts self-certified with the CFTC on May 13. Rothera’s soccer contracts were self-certified on May 27.
Rothera rollout does not fully replace Kalshi World Cup markets
Robinhood’s World Cup rollout does not mean the company has moved all of its soccer contracts to Rothera.
The Robinhood app showed a dedicated World Cup section this week, with markets organized into categories including games, tournament outcomes, awards, group qualifiers, group winners, elimination, advancement, total goals, player goals and team goals. But the underlying contracts appear to be split between Rothera and Kalshi.
Rules links on Robinhood markets showed some World Cup contracts tied to Rothera terms, including the main World Cup winner market and some match-level outcome, spread and total-goals markets. Other World Cup-related markets still linked to Kalshi terms, including player contracts, parlay-style combinations and some tournament-prop markets such as first-time World Cup winner, group-to-win-the-tournament and award markets.
Bloomberg reported Thursday that some World Cup contracts on Robinhood will continue to be routed to Kalshi, including the player contracts and combinations. The company will make routing decisions during the tournament based on factors like liquidity and resolution clarity, Mackenzie told Bloomberg.
Kalshi remains part of Robinhood’s World Cup product
The split routing model is significant because Robinhood has been one of Kalshi’s most important distribution partners. Bloomberg reported that Robinhood users accounted for nearly a quarter of Kalshi’s overall trading volume in March.
Kalshi also has a large direct World Cup product. Its public World Cup hub showed more than 400 markets as of Friday morning, including individual games, group markets, tournament futures, awards, props and player/team goal markets.
Robinhood’s offering is harder to count from the outside. More than 50 World Cup-related event pages were publicly discoverable on Robinhood’s web product, though the web version did not show the same dedicated World Cup hub that was visible in the app.
Rothera gives Robinhood a path beyond outside exchanges
That makes the launch less a full replacement of Kalshi than the start of a hybrid model. Robinhood has used Kalshi and ForecastEx contracts since launching its prediction markets hub in March 2025. At a recent investor conference, CFO Shiv Verma said Robinhood expects most of its prediction market flow to migrate to its own exchange over time, according to MarketBeat.
In a lengthy X post Thursday, Rothera framed the World Cup launch as a starting point rather than the full strategy, saying its event-contract infrastructure will eventually support markets tied to economic data, weather, policy decisions and geopolitical developments.
The post also nodded to contract-listing discipline at a time when prediction market operators are drawing more scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators. Rothera said it reviews contracts for “compliance, market integrity, liquidity and susceptibility to manipulation,” adding that it is “not here to list every possible event.”
Lower fees for Rothera-routed contracts
Robinhood is also pitching the Rothera rollout as a lower-cost trading model for customers.
The company said it introduced a new prediction-market pricing model on June 1, with commission fees that vary based on contract price and order size. Robinhood said those fees are lower for contracts priced near $0.01 or $0.99 and will not exceed $0.01 per contract. For contracts routed through Kalshi or ForecastEx, trading costs can be higher because Robinhood’s commission is layered on top of the exchange’s own fee.
Customers with Robinhood Gold, the company’s paid membership plan, will receive up to 50% lower commission fees than non-Gold customers. Users who refer five friends to prediction markets will be able to unlock uncapped $0 commissions on World Cup trades beginning June 8, according to the Robinhood announcement.
World Cup offers major test for prediction markets
The World Cup begins June 11, giving Robinhood and Rothera a quick test of the new exchange infrastructure ahead of one of the largest global sporting events of the year. The tournament runs through July 19 and includes 104 matches across the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
Other prediction market operators are also preparing for the tournament. For example, Fanatics Markets launched a dedicated World Cup hub last week through a partnership with ADI Predictstreet.
DeFi Rate estimated this week that Americans will trade more than $2.5 billion on 2026 World Cup prediction markets, including a projected $1.47 billion on Kalshi alone. The analysis found that Kalshi’s World Cup winner market is pacing ahead of its comparable March Madness market and projected it could reach about $253 million in volume by the end of the tournament.
DeFi Rate is tracking World Cup prediction market volume and contract odds throughout the tournament and has launched a free World Cup bracket challenge.
