Robinhood Bets, Prediction Hubs and On Chain-Off Exchange Betting….
Good afternoon fellow degenerates…
Check this massive launch from Robinhood – a prediction market hub around the NCAA tournament…
Trade your bracket in our new prediction market hub.
The men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments are now live in the app: rbnhd.co/college-basket…
The first round starts later today, see you then.
— Robinhood (@RobinhoodApp)
1:00 PM • Mar 20, 2025
I made my first $25 bet today on the Robinhood app. It was really easy. I bet Oklahoma. I have NOT followed either team but it was an 8 versus 9 seed and Oklahoma is the underdog.
I do not gamble (I am in the minority). Even if I wanted to bet, the gambling apps like Draftkings confuse me. I just don’t get the language.
But, I can see myself making small bets often now because I live In the Stocktwits and the Robinhood app. This is a native way for me to have a little bit of fun speculating/betting…
Here is the screen on Robinhood that showed me the bet/odds:
While the world debates the right or wrong of it, the degenerate economy continues to accelerate.
I am tripling down on education, portfolio construction, and risk management (as Is our firm Social Leverage) because of this acceleration and because you can’t put free time and access to degeneracy back ‘in the box’.
When we made our seed investment in Robinhood back in early 2014, we had no idea that options would be so popular let alone the idea of Robinhood entering the betting world via futures markets. Our thesis was that the mobile, social world would explode the do-it-yourself investing market size with an incredibly low customer acquisition cost as fuel.
We were right about that which was enough to make it a homerun on it’s own.
Today the United States has way too many apps for investing, trading, betting and the customer acquisition costs have exploded. As interest rates have risen, the idea that venture capitalists will fund the next Robinhood or even could do so successfully is a bet we would not make.
Some luck has been involved for sure, but Robinhood is pressing their new found dominance.
They should.
At the same time, crypto, stablecoins and crypto wallets are starting to take better shape.
I now see a world of on-chain, off exchange peer to peer betting on everything from stock movements to sports that get settled on the blockchain into crypto wallets. The spreads will shrink of course which is great for the bettors and platforms like Stocktwits which have millions of people hanging out all day and used to interacting with each other around objects like stocks and markets (and soon to be games/teams). Very soon we will be able to connect people’s real wallet to their pseudonymous profile and the betting will happen in places like Stocktwits. Maybe it is a licensed piece of the action or maybe we just make it a simple subscription service. The lawyers will figure this all out in time.
I’ll take a $NVDA close over $120 and The Leafs tonight over The Bruins!
I am first in line for these type of social, silly bets.
For kicks, once that bet is placed, thousands of others can bet on that bet.
You may not like this future, but it is the future.
