Wall Street broker Bernstein has told clients that prediction market volumes could reach $1 trillion by 2030, with Robinhood and Coinbase the most likely retail-facing winners, in a research note that has already moved Robinhood's stock and reframed the analyst conversation around how the company should be valued.
The Bernstein call, reported by CoinDesk on April 15, lifts Robinhood's price target to $130 and frames prediction markets as a category-creating product rather than a peripheral feature. The note argues that the regulated US market for event contracts, today dominated by Kalshi and Polymarket on the crypto side, is in the early innings of a customer-acquisition land grab in which existing consumer brokerages have a structural distribution advantage.
The market's response was immediate. Robinhood shares surged on the day of the note and added another 7% in a separate session this week after the Securities and Exchange Commission delivered what 24/7 Wall St. described as a "massive win" for retail traders, clarifying that certain event contracts can be offered to non-accredited US investors. Webull, which sits in a similar competitive position, ran 8% on the same news.
Truist's analyst team set out the bear case in parallel. In a note flagged by TechStock, the firm cautioned that the same prediction market product that drives engagement for Robinhood could pressure traditional commission and payment-for-order-flow revenue if customers re-deploy trading dollars into low-cost binary contracts rather than equities or options. Truist's framing was less a rejection of the Bernstein thesis than a warning about mix shift.
Robinhood itself has begun signalling how it plans to manage that tension. SimplyWall.st reported on April 14 that the company is tightening prediction market access, balancing growth in the new product line with limits intended to maintain market integrity and customer protection. The implicit message is that Robinhood views the category as core enough to design its own guardrails rather than wait for regulator-imposed ones.
Coinbase's positioning is structurally different. Its prediction market exposure runs through both its own product roadmap and its broader role as the on-chain liquidity venue for the category. Polymarket settles in USDC on Ethereum-based rails, and growth in event-contract volume effectively translates to growth in Coinbase's stablecoin and infrastructure footprint.
Bernstein's $1 trillion estimate would put prediction markets within an order of magnitude of the global crypto spot trading market and well above the listed equity options market in notional terms. The headline figure has drawn pushback. Skeptics argue that even $100 billion in annual prediction market notional would be a stretch given liquidity constraints in the underlying contracts and the slow pace at which institutional capital adopts new contract structures.
The sceptical case has weight, but it is fighting a clear flow story. Polymarket's monthly notional has grown several hundred percent year-on-year, Kalshi's election volumes broke records, and the underlying universe of contracts, ranging from Federal Reserve rate decisions to Oscar winners to commodity prints, is expanding at a pace traditional exchanges cannot match.
For Robinhood specifically, the Bernstein call pushes a thesis that has been forming for months. The company's transition from a single-product trading app to a multi-product retail financial platform now has its first analyst-priced category. Whether $1 trillion proves conservative or wildly optimistic, the market is pricing the next leg of the Robinhood story around prediction markets, not equities.