Robinhood UK plans, EU expansion for predicting markets

Following the strong US -Prediction markets, Broker’s discount robinhood explores ways to bring the offer abroad, with early plans to launch similar services to the United Kingdom and Europe.
The company introduced the hub of its guessing markets earlier this year, a platform that allowed users to trade in the outcomes of real-world events, such as interest rate decisions or sports results. Today, Robinhood is in discussions with the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to determine how to offer such products locally, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
However, one of the major challenges lies in the regulation classification.
In the United States, prophecy markets are considered as futures products, which are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In other constituents, similar products may fall under gambling laws, which raises questions about administration.
“So the question is where’s the swap oversight, let’s say in the UK? That’s a question we asked the FCA, how can we work?” JB Mackenzie, vice president and general futures manager in Robinhood Markets, told Bloomberg.
Mackenzie added that the UK and Europe are among the regions showing the strongest demand for Prophecy market products.
The interest in expanding abroad is understood. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev recently told X that the platform has seen more than 4 billion event contracts exchanged, with more than half of the volume taking place in the third quarter.
While the Robinhood product mimic the structure of decentralized prophecy markets, it is built entirely on traditional financial metals, not blockchain. The contracts in the event are conducted by the oliA CFTC-regulated derivatives exchange, and lived in the US dollar.
Although, Robinhood remains highly active in the crypto and blockchain sectors, which offers digital asset trading and move toward Tokenized stock offerings.
Decentralized prophecy markets get land
The prophecy markets have progressed to the popularity in the past year, which has been the growth of decentralized platforms. Built on public blockchains, these markets use intelligent contracts to automatically trading and payout, allowing users to think of outcomes from elections to economic and sporting data.
However, unlike the traditional exchange, Decentralized platforms offer more transparency And accessing, even though they also face challenges such as increased volatility, regulation uncertainty and uneven liquidity.
The leading decentralized platform, the Polymarket, built at the Polygon, reported billions of dollars to the monthly trading volume, with the activity that was peering in November 2024 during the lead-up of the US presidential election.
The accuracy and liquidity of the polymarket During that cycle the extensive attention was drawn, as the forecasts of entrepreneurs were often monitored closely to the results.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Blerin described election cycles such as beginning, noting that deeper change lies in the use of financial incentives to align the behavior that seeks the truth.
“The wider concept is that you can use finances as a way to align incentives to provide viewers’ important information,” he said.
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