Robinhood expands into offering NFL parlays and prop bets
Robinhood is expanding its prediction markets platform by now offering its customers the ability to place NFL parlay and prop bets.
Launching this week, customers can place parlay-style trades and player-specific wagers on professional football outcomes and individual performances, moving beyond simple yes/no market bets.
These new features include preset combos, which are multi-outcome contracts that only pay out if every component is correct, similar to traditional parlays.
Robinhood also plans to launch custom combo options early next year, where users can bundle up to 10 different outcomes into a single trade.
Speaking about the new additions, Robinhood vice president and general manager JB Mackenzie said, “This was a great opportunity for us to really be able to become the leader in the space, and that’s what we’re working to do. The enhancements here are another example of it, where we’re trying to build new customer experiences that make it easier and, in some cases, provide them more advanced order types and trading capabilities to meet the needs that they’re asking us for.”
Robinhood’s move into prediction markets began in 2024 at the height of the presidential election by partnering with clearing exchange ForecastEx.
A year later, Robinhood partnered with prediction market platform Kalshi and most recently announced a partnership with trading firm Susquehanna International.
The group has generated US$100 million in annualized revenue, as well as recorded 11 billion traded contracts.
Charlotte Capewell brings her passion for storytelling and expertise in writing, researching, and the gambling industry to every article she writes. Her specialties include the US gambling industry, regulator legislation, igaming, and more.
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The Backstory
A fast pivot from binary markets to parlays
Robinhood’s move into NFL parlays and player props caps a yearlong sprint to turn its prediction markets from yes/no event contracts into a broader sports product. The company began laying the groundwork in early 2024 when it introduced a prediction markets hub through its derivatives unit, routing trades to regulated exchange Kalshi and signaling it would proceed “in compliance with existing regulations.” That debut, timed to March Madness, also revealed the limits of the experiment: a planned Super Bowl rollout was halted after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission intervened, forcing a pause on sports contracts. The firm framed the setback as procedural rather than existential and kept building the infrastructure behind the scenes, from clearing partners to user experience.
By late summer, Robinhood reemerged with football-focused markets, saying it would offer NFL and college contracts for the opening weeks of the season and explore weekly markets thereafter. The company pitched the format as market-driven pricing between buyers and sellers rather than a house book, a distinction meant to keep the product closer to trading than traditional sports wagering. Rival Kalshi moved in parallel, expanding its own NFL lineup. That cadence set the stage for today’s expansion into combinations of outcomes more familiar to sportsbook customers, from prebuilt combos to a coming custom builder.
Underneath the feature rollout is a commercial rationale. Leadership has repeatedly pointed to sustained user engagement around sports and news-driven events, and the product shift mirrors customer demand for more granular ways to express views on individual player performance. It also edges the business toward higher-frequency, stickier activity that can translate into recurring revenue, especially if parlays behave like in-app bundles that lift transaction counts and take rates.
Regulators and leagues tighten the perimeter
The timing is delicate. Professional leagues are pushing back on bet types they view as vulnerable to manipulation, elevating compliance risk for any operator that offers player-specific outcomes. The NFL recently notified teams that it intends to tighten rules on player-based props, coordinating with regulators and sportsbooks after a spate of integrity cases in other leagues. While the memo was not tied to a specific scandal, it underscored the league’s focus on wagers linked to injuries, officiating and single-player actions, categories that can be swayed by nonpublic information or targeted harassment of athletes. The move follows Major League Baseball’s limits on pitch-related wagers and similar scrutiny in the NBA.
For prediction markets, the NFL has been more explicit. League officials have said these platforms “mimic sports betting” and, for now, do not meet the same regulatory expectations as licensed books, such as integrity monitoring and market prohibitions. That guidance effectively bars league personnel from using exchanges like Kalshi, Polymarket and Robinhood for sports outcomes and raises questions about the types of markets that will be acceptable as exchanges add prop-like contracts. Even if Robinhood’s products clear through a CFTC-regulated venue, leagues are signaling a higher bar for transparency and data-sharing akin to sportsbook standards.
The policy drumbeat matters because it can trigger state-level responses. As governors and regulators react to league concerns, they can impose bet-type restrictions or enforcement priorities that spill over into adjacent products. Features that look and feel like parlays, especially those tied to player performance, will attract the most scrutiny.
From March Madness to Week 1: a compliance learning curve
Robinhood’s early foray offered a playbook for what regulators will tolerate. When the company rolled out its prediction hub during March Madness, it stressed that college sports trading would carry participation limits and that its exchange partner’s rulebook applied. The initial Super Bowl setback showed the CFTC could draw lines around sports-centric contracts even on a federally regulated event exchange. That episode likely informed the summer strategy: launch narrowly with NFL and college football markets for a defined window, test liquidity and guardrails, then iterate toward weekly cadence.
As the NFL season approached, Robinhood emphasized market mechanics over gambling vernacular, seeking to differentiate itself from sportsbooks while offering familiar endpoints like winners, totals and spreads. Kalshi’s simultaneous push into football underscored the category’s competitive pressure: the audience for political and macroeconomic event contracts had grown, but sports remained the most potent on-ramp for mainstream users. The latest shift to parlays and props suggests the firm believes its compliance controls and exchange partnerships can support more complex bundles without tipping into prohibited territory.
Still, policy winds are shifting. If leagues and regulators curtail specific prop categories, exchanges may need to reconfigure contracts or cap exposures. Today’s feature set will be tested against that evolving backdrop.
Chasing scale as rivals surge
The business case is straightforward: prediction platforms are posting record volumes, and Robinhood wants a larger share. After partnering with Kalshi in March, the company has said its users account for roughly a quarter to a third of Kalshi’s daily activity. Industrywide momentum has accelerated. In one recent month, Kalshi and Polymarket combined for an estimated $1.4 billion in trading volume, while Intercontinental Exchange disclosed a multibillion-dollar investment in Polymarket, a sign that institutional backers see a durable new asset class taking shape. For Robinhood, leaning into parlays and props is a way to meet users where the liquidity is and to build products that keep them transacting inside its app rather than drifting to standalone exchanges.
Corporate strategy is evolving alongside the product. Executives have floated acquisitions, joint ventures or deeper partnerships to speed market entry and add capabilities. The company has also been in talks with foreign regulators, including the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority, about how its offering would be structured overseas. International expansion could diversify regulatory risk and broaden the addressable base, but it also multiplies compliance regimes at the very moment sports markets are drawing heightened scrutiny.
Internally, Robinhood’s recent linkups with a regulated exchange and a large trading firm suggest it is building the liquidity and market-making spine needed for more sophisticated contracts. That plumbing is critical for combo markets, where fills across multiple legs must be coordinated and hedged.
The stakes: integrity, user safety and a moving rulebook
The intersection of parlays, player props and prediction markets sits squarely in the crosshairs of integrity concerns. Leagues warn that narrowly defined player outcomes can invite pressure on athletes and exploitation of inside information. The NFL has not hesitated to classify prediction platforms as prohibited betting for its personnel, and it is educating teams accordingly. If regulators harmonize around those views, exchanges will need to enforce tighter market eligibility, adopt sportsbook-style integrity feeds and possibly share more data with leagues.
For Robinhood, the path forward runs through clear differentiation, robust controls and disciplined scope. Products that resemble stock-like trading in broad outcomes may be easier to defend than those calibrated to a single player’s snap count. But customer demand is strongest where specificity lives, and rivals are already monetizing that interest. The company’s challenge is to capture that engagement without tripping the wires that stalled its first Super Bowl push.
The next checkpoints are predictable: how state regulators respond to league lobbying on props, how federal overseers treat sports event contracts on exchanges, and whether mainstream platforms can codify integrity standards that satisfy all three. The answer will determine whether parlays and props become a durable growth pillar for prediction markets—or another feature set rewritten by the rulebook in midseason.
Read more on the NFL’s planned crackdown on player-based props in the league’s memo to teams, its broader view that prediction platforms mimic betting in recent policy guidance, Robinhood’s football launch strategy in its early-season rollout, the exchange-led debut and Super Bowl setback in the March Madness launch, and the company’s M&A posture and international ambitions in leadership’s remarks on growth options.
